To our delight, life is never a long calm river with Pedro Almodóvar, who goes from comedy (Women on the brink of crisisdand nerves) to melodrama (Speak with her) with ease, always inhabited by a concern for maniacal elegance. To the point where hospitals could triumph in a decoration magazine, at least the one we see in Parallel mothers. Even if the place will upset the existence of two future mothers, its walls sport bright and warm colors, in perfect contrast to the drama about to be played out for these women separated by age, social condition and especially the circumstances of their pregnancy. On this point, the contrast looks like a chasm.
One might believe — even fear! — that there will be Etienne Chatiliez in this idea of interchanged infants landing in a different clan, with its share of misunderstandings and moral dilemmas. However, Almodóvar decides to follow less marked paths, intertwining the traumas of the Spanish Civil War with family and sentimental betrayals of our time: divorce, sexual assault and careerism. To tell the truth, like this common grave that Janis (Penélope Cruz, always dazzling in front of the camera of her compatriot) wants to move in order to find the remains of her great-grandfather who died under the bullets of General Franco , the excavation of the shameful secrets that surround this mixture of children cannot be done without risk.
Even though Janis, a renowned photographer, refuses to allow her passing lover, Arturo (Israel Elejalde), be more than a progenitor, this anthropologist will be able to help him in his quest for the past, also becoming the spark plug in an equally distressing hunt for truth. The man does not recognize himself in the features of the child, sowing doubt in Janis’ mind. Her research leads her to Ana (Milena Smit, frail figure, but very confident), a teenager who gave birth the same day as her. She is touched by this girl whose own mother, an actress (powerful Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), does not quite embody maternal instinct. Their reunion, apparently warm, hides a mountain of potential dangers.
Without pastiche, Almodóvar knows how to recognize his affiliation with Alfred Hitchcock: in his love for actresses he talked to us about recently, but also in the meticulous care he gives to the aesthetics that coat them and this attraction for psychological suspense. The “bomb” that he places in the hands of Janis, the sole holder of the great secret of the origins of the two children, distills a tense atmosphere, but the filmmaker patiently constructs a web in which the two mothers become entangled. To the point of tearing each other apart? All the talent of the director of Volover unfolds here, in this tangle of frustrations, unacknowledged desires, deaf rivalries, pushing one and the other to gestures of rupture, or rapprochement, which will not be without consequences.
Janis’ dogged search to stir up the ashes of Spain’s bloody past isn’t just a pretext to meet the man who will change her life, taking advantage of a photo shoot to solicit her services. This process of truth and reconciliation crosses Parallel mothers from start to finish, accentuating the photographer’s contradictions, burying in turn the errors of others (starting with that of the hospital staff) and later his own (Cruz turns into a sublime madre dolorosa).
We have qualified pain and glory, his previous feature film, a fictionalized autobiography, illustrating the slump of a filmmaker on the verge of exhaustion. Even if he hides behind all these women, from the oldest to the youngest, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, Parallel mothers reveals the coherence of an exemplary approach as well as an attempt to mediate with a History that Almodóvar preferred to forget, the very last image of the film imposing itself as a sublime note of hope. Because in his universe, if we seem to know everything about mothers, they continue to surprise us, to move us and to destabilize us with their implacable frankness or their unorthodox desires. They are here perfectly synchronous with him.