Parallel Mothers review: A complex melodrama that brings new depth to Pedro Almodóvar’s fearless women

Dir: Pedro Almodóvar. Starring: Penélope Cruz, Milena Smit, Israel Elejalde, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Rossy de Palma. Cert 15, 123 minutes

Of all the women Penélope Cruz has brought to life for Pedro Almodóvar, it’s Volver’s Raimunda who has stood like a titan above the rest. It’s the performance that earned her an Oscar nomination, one of a mother whose resilience knows no bounds. Raimunda is a being of such hard-earned wisdom and complexity that she seems to contain universes within that puffed-up beehive of hers. But if the heroine of Parallel Mothers – the eighth film Almodóvar and Cruz have made together over four decades – lives under the shadow of Raimunda, she doesn’t do so quietly.

Janice is a photographer in Madrid, the kind of middle class, liberal type who wears “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirts. After an affair with a married archaeologist (Israel Elejalde’s Arturo), she gives birth to a girl she names Cecilia. Her roommate in the hospital is a forlorn-looking teenager named Ana (Milena Smit). Both pregnancies were unplanned – Janice doesn’t regret it, Ana does. It’s the starting point for a companionship that grows into something more profound, after Janice discovers a secret about their two children that could only lead to devastating consequences. Together both women don’t only cross paths, they fold into each other, in a way that directly contradicts Almodóvar’s chosen title for the film. Call it an intersection of destinies, or a union of feminine wills.

Ana’s mother, Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) is too distracted with her acting career to really fulfil any duty of care. So it’s instead Janice and Ana who share the frame together. When they sit opposite each other, the curves of their profiles are gracefully matched to look like an Almodóvarian Rubin’s vase illusion. Smit is vulnerable, but not entirely weak, in a way that Cruz seizes upon with a kind of forceful, empathetic instinct. Janice is far from saintly, but Cruz is so effusive and open in her approach that she seems to overflow with love – for Ana, for Cecilia, even for the baby’s father. It’s chaotic, at times, but it’s pure. Doesn’t that describe so much of who Almodóvar is as a filmmaker?

His sense of melodrama remains intact – when Janice and Arturo have sex, white curtains billow out the open window with what seems to be the pure force of their passion. The dramatic revelations come thick and fast, and are mildly improbable in their nature. Antxon Gómez’s production design lavishes every inch of Janice’s life with the bold, primary palettes of Spanish folk art.

But nothing about Parallel Mothers suggests that, at the age of 72, Almodóvar is too comfortable with his own mastery of the form. Perhaps a little of the old transgressiveness is gone, but it’s left room instead for a more deeply rooted fervour. This is the first film in which the filmmaker has overtly tackled the legacy of the Spanish civil war. Janice initially approaches Arturo for his help in excavating a grave containing 10 bodies in her hometown, all early victims of the Franco regime. Among them is her great-grandfather.

Almodóvar closes his film with a quote from Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: “No history is mute. No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth.” After decades of collective suppression, it wasn’t until 2007 that Spain’s Law of Historical Memory finally began the process of reckoning and resolution. Part of that process has involved the identifying and exhuming of mass graves. Janice is the daughter of a single mother, who in turn was the daughter of a single mother, whose husband was taken out in the night and shot.

Parallel Mothers, in that way, brings a new sense of depth to Almodóvar’s gallery of fearless women – suggesting that their strength is not always by choice. Women have always had to pick themselves up out of the ashes of history, and find a way to carry on.