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For “Almodrama” aficionados, there is much that feels familiar in the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's most recent film, Parallel Mothers . His distinctive aesthetic of vibrantly coloured and voluptuously shaped objects “popping” onto the screen, often in passionate reds, still works its magic. Drawing the gaze and mobilising desire—oh glorious peppers! ah retro toaster!—Almodóvar brings the viewer into contact with an interior world that feels simultaneously wondrous and strange, and very much alive.
Here, a similar dynamic sets in motion Almodóvar's first feature film to explore overtly a specific political terrain: the exhumation of the remains of the dead from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In the opening scene, we see a man through the camera lens of a woman during a magazine photo shoot, allowing an object of desire with its own subjectivity to come into focus in the returned gaze of the other. He is Arturo, a forensic anthropologist and the only male character with a voice and a purpose in the film. She is Janis (Penelope Cruz), a professional photographer, requesting Arturo's help with the exhumation of her great-grandfather, and others, from a mass grave in a field outside their village. Together, her personal motive and his professional means allow for a kind of creative coupling driving the narrative. Their passionate love-making dramatises an urgency in the desire for truth and reparation (through the return of the dead to the living, for proper burial) after the destruction and silencing that still, some seventy-five years on from the Civil War, cast long shadows in Spain.
Fast forward a few months and Janis, thirty-nine, meets Ana (Milena Smit), nineteen, the parallel mother of the film's title, in a modern maternity ward. Despite their differences, they have an affinity as single mothers, a rapport made possible, almost ordinary, in the (comparatively privileged, urban, and secular) world they come to inhabit. Yet there is something extraordinary