• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About
  • Donate

The Arts Fuse

Boston's Online Arts Magazine: Dance, Film, Literature, Music, Theater, and more

  • Podcasts
  • Coming Attractions
  • Reviews
  • Short Fuses
  • Interviews
  • Commentary
  • The Arts
    • Performing Arts
      • Dance
      • Music
      • Theater
    • Other
      • Books
      • Film
      • Food
      • Television
      • Visual Arts
You are here: Home / Featured / Film Review: Pedro Almodovar’s “Parallel Mothers” — Let It Bear You Away

Film Review: Pedro Almodovar’s “Parallel Mothers” — Let It Bear You Away

October 11, 2021 Leave a Comment

By Erica Abeel

Pedro Almodovar’s latest, Parallel Mothers, sets up a dialectic between women’s regenerative powers and the blood-soaked history of pre-WWII Spain.

Parallel Mothers, directed by Pedro Almodovar.

Milena Smit and Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers.

Parallel Mothers, which closed the New York Film Festival 2021 with a grand flourish, plays at times like a telenovela embellished with auteurist bona fides. This will hardly surprise Almodovar fans. In a departure, though, his new film also weaves in Spain’s troubled history, in particular the mass murders and other atrocities visited by Franco on his opponents around the time of the Civil War, lending it gravitas and poignancy. That legacy of injustice and violent death frames a story — central to the auteur’s oeuvre — about women bringing forth new life, the various shades of maternity, and female community independent of men. As always, Almodovar’s ravishing colors and interior design are all on display; Mothers unscrolls primarily indoors, as if Nature would be a sorry substitute for the palette, proportions, and artful tchotchkes — placed just so — of the auteur’s curated world.

As Janis, ever-gorgeous Penelope Cruz is a photographer nearing 40. She first appears shooting a magazine piece about Arturo (Israel Elejalde), an attractive forensic anthropologist and head of the Historical Memory Association, tasked with digging up the unmarked graves of Franco’s victims so the families can give them a proper burial. Post-shoot Janis urgently presses Arturo to help locate the grave of her own great-grandfather. Before you can say “excavate” the pair rendezvous in a hotel room in Madrid, white curtains billowing in the breeze.

Cut to a maternity ward where Janis is beginning labor in a room with Ana, another pregnant woman barely out of her teens. This alacrity is standard practice with Almodovar and a major delight in his films. He cheekily skips transitions (it’s Arturo’s baby we presume, several beats late) and hurtles to major plot points, kind of like a luge speeding along its course.

The two new mothers bond while the babies are “in observation” at the hospital for possible complications. Almodovar never lacks for backstories. Named by hippie parents for Janis Joplin, Janis, it turns out, has previously split with Arturo, who is caring for a sick wife and not in the market for a second family. No agonizing here over an absent father, or, heaven forfend, male betrayal. Janis decided she and Arturo could never go the distance; she’s joyously prepared to raise the baby on her own. What a thumb in the eye to centuries of weeping women! Janis turns for support to her bestie, Rossy de Palma, the Almodovar regular whose outsize presence never fails to startle.

Ana (newcomer Milena Smit, excellent) is less sanguine. She’s been effectively shafted by her mother, who would rather pursue a last-ditch acting career than change diapers; her dad can’t be bothered. Typically, for the Spanish auteur, everyone, as Jean Renoir said, has her reasons.

Complications multiply. Arturo stops by to look at his baby and announces with conviction she’s not his child. Janice goes ballistic. (Rossy remarks, “She is rather ethnic looking,” which is not true of her parents.) A couple of maternity tests, and the truth is revealed (though the viewer has likely already guessed this bombshell lifted straight from soap opera). Meanwhile Ana has moved in with Janis, a maternal figure to the teenager. Inevitably in Almodovar, where desire obeys no rules, the women become lovers. Incest-lite is right in his wheelhouse. With Arturo still on the periphery, along with a second wrench of the plot, all bases are loaded.

The film’s energy sags in the third act, which focuses on a visit with Arturo to Janis’s family in their village, as he organizes the excavation of the grave site. The filmmaker is more at ease with the heat and textures of maternal love than he is with grand historical statements.

Mothers treats the viewer with a rhapsody in different hues of green — even the fridge is olive, Arturo’s car an eye-popping chartreuse. Colors are a virtual character in Almodovar, and serve to link scenes. As always, Cruz is the perfect embodiment of the auteur’s impetuous style. She manages a nakedness — even loaded with eye makeup — that elides any space between her and the viewer. Some actresses do fine work, but you’re never aware of their bodies (think Streep and Nicole Kidman). Not so with Cruz. Her physicality flashes from the screen. Her bosom, a virtual scene-stealer, deserves a credit of its own. (Almodovar has declared his fascination with this part of his star’s anatomy.)

Smit nails the vulnerability of a young woman who’s been brutalized by male buddies (shades of Brett Kavanaugh) and cast aside by her family. As a mother who herself craves a mother, she shines in scenes with Cruz that reflect her neediness. Like few male filmmakers, Almodovar is in deep sympathy with women, celebrating the rich worlds they fashion with each other. Amusingly, the male characters are shallow, indecisive, okay for fun in bed and reproducing the species, but ancillary. The filmmaker is not only in sync with the times but maybe several steps ahead.

Mothers sets up a dialectic between women’s regenerative powers and the blood-soaked history of pre-WWII Spain, but it could be argued that the two themes fail to entirely mesh. The connection points between them may stretch a bridge too far. Still, a final scene of villagers marching with their photos of the departed will moisten eyes. And, an odd thing for a critic to say — it’s best if you suspend critical judgment of this film, and simply allow its wayward momentum to bear you along.


Erica Abeel is a novelist, film and cultural critic, and former professor at CUNY. Her 2016 novel Wild Girls, about three women rebels of the ’50s, was an Oprah Magazine pick. Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, Indiewire, and other major sites and national publications. A former dancer, when not writing she’s in a Pilates class or at the barre. Her new novel, The Commune, was recently published by Adelaide Books.

Share
Tweet
Pin
Share

By: Erica Abeel Filed Under: Featured, Film, Review Tagged: Erica Abeel, Parallel Mothers, Pedro Almodovar

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Search

Popular Posts

  • Classical Concert Review: The Boston Symphony Orchestra Plays Wolfe and Górecki Brimming with edge-of-seat intensity and fist-waving th... posted on March 17, 2023
  • Book Review: “Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History” Even more impressive than the sheer amount of raw knowl... posted on March 14, 2023
  • Rock Concert Review: Elvis Costello — Proudly Flaunting his Dependability and Unpredictability Elvis Costello loves to visit various regions of the pa... posted on March 10, 2023
  • Jazz Remembrance: Tribute to Wayne Shorter One of the true masters of jazz, Wayne Shorter, passed... posted on March 4, 2023
  • Folk Album Review: “Ears of the People” — Ekonting Songs from Senegal and the Gambia The banjo’s African relative makes its American debut v... posted on February 24, 2023

Social

Follow us:

Footer

  • About Us
  • Advertising/Underwriting
  • Syndication
  • Media Resources
  • Editors and Contributors

We Are

Boston’s online arts magazine since 2007. Powered by 70+ experts and writers.

Follow Us

Monthly Archives

Categories

"Use the point of your pen, not the feather." -- Jonathan Swift

Copyright © 2023 · The Arts Fuse - All Rights Reserved · Website by Stephanie Franz