Venice 2021: Parallel Mothers movie review – Penélope Cruz stars in Pedro Almodóvar’s thought-provoking melodrama, set against Spain’s history of dictatorship

4/5 stars

Pedro Almodóvar opened the 2021 Venice International Film Festival with Parallel Mothers, a typically thought-provoking melodrama starring his regular muse Penélope Cruz.

It’s 24 years since the Spanish director first cast Cruz in Live Flesh and they’ve been inseparable ever since. Here she plays Janis, a single, successful photographer living in Madrid. When she meets Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a forensic anthropologist, they have a brief but passionate affair that results in a pregnancy. Already married, Arturo backs away and Janis resolves to have the baby on her own.

At the hospital, she meets Ana (Milena Smit), a teenager who is also pregnant. Her baby’s father is not around and her mother is more concerned with her late blooming career as a theatre actress than her daughter’s welfare.

Janis and Ana give birth on the same day, and swap numbers to stay in touch. Then comes the first of the twists as Arturo looks at Janis’ baby and is convinced it’s not his. He requests a paternity test, which Janis refuses, but later, her mind changed, she does a home test. The result is shocking: she is not the biological mother.

If you’re expecting a baby swap melodrama, well, Almodóvar is the sort of director who never delivers the obvious. There is love, jealousy and passion, alongside a deeper subplot – the reason Arturo and Janis first met.

In her hometown there is a shallow grave where the remains of her great-grandfather and others lie, which she and the other townspeople are petitioning to have excavated, with Arturo’s help. These poor souls were victims of the Franco regime during the Spanish civil war.

As the film’s concluding caption says, “no history is mute”, and the film strikes a balance between the personal trials of Janis and Ana, who has suffered a great deal in her young life, and this wider historical backdrop.

They make for uncomfortable bedfellows at times, but maybe that’s the point. When the townspeople march towards the grave, holding pictures of their lost loved ones, you can’t help but be moved.

Parallel Mothers may not be quite on the level of his great movies – All About My Mother, Volver and Talk To Her – but this is Almodóvar at his most serious. Even his trademark colourful production design is more muted.

While he has touched on the Franco era before, notably in Bad Education, it’s invigorating to see him switch from female desire to his country’s past political turbulence. Once again, he proves why he’s such an enduring talent.

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