I was willing to accept the ending/epilogue a little more than you, Sabin (indeed, I think the film could have explored that track more deeply and been more interesting for it), but I tend to agree with you overall. I hadn't read anything about the movie other than a couple blurbs but really had very little knowledge of the plot or gestalt. In my head, I thought it might be going down a more lurid/Skin I Lived In path (which is an underrated Almodovar) - Iglesias' score certainly hints that it might (has there every been a major movie that incorporated the music so sloppily?). I was a little disappointed it stayed as staid as it did.
Cruz did solid work, but I'm not as enthusiastic about her nomination as I would've liked to have been. It feels like minor Almodovar, which is not without it's pleasures, but I'm a little surprised at some of the enthusiasm.
Parallel Mothers
Re: Parallel Mothers
OH SCREW IT, SPOILERS!
I suspect that one's mileage with Parallel Mothers might depend on how bothered one gets at getting ahead of the plot. Parallel Mothers is a switched at birth story. It makes total sense that Pedro Almodovar would tell this story at some point. You'd think "Okay, once the "switched at birth" part gets out, Pedro is going to really cut loose." But you'd be wrong.That's almost the whole story save for an epilogue that I'll get back to. The film starts off promisingly enough as Penelope Cruz's photographer seeks out a Arturo (married) who can help her (basically; I know I'm going to get some of this wrong) exhume the unmarked grave of her great grandfather and his family who were killed by the fascists and give them the proper burial they deserve, and before long the two of them begin having sex; cut to pregnant about-to-pop Penelope Cruz. Everything I just wrote is excellent. I love how it ties the search for the past into having a family, which is essentially creating the future. While in the hospital, middle-aged Penelope Cruz (weird to say that) gives birth at the same time as a younger woman named Ana, they form a friendship, and part ways. Penelope Cruz has her baby and informs Arturo, who remarks that the baby looks nothing like him and thus he cannot be the father. Almodovar touched on something very compelling in the idea of a baby's developing features being the launch of a mystery. I liked that. But it's played a little slowly, which is about to become a trend.
Even if I didn't know it was a switched at birth story, there's no way anyone could watch this without wondering "Hey, I wonder if they were switched at birth." Cruz does a maternity test and comes up negative. She is not the mother! Okay, they're switched at birth. Time to tell Ana. But instead, Ana comes back into Penelope Cruz's life. And we learn that Ana's baby has died, which means Cruz's real baby has died. Horrific. Does she tell Ana? No. Because Cruz is about to fire her au pair, Cruz hires Ana to take care of the baby... and yet doesn't inform Ana that her baby is switched at birth. Instead, she takes a cotton swab of Ana's mouth. Somehow Ana doesn't ask "What the fuck are you doing?" and confirms that Ana is the mother of the child. Does Cruz tell her? No. Around this point, we are nearing the one hour mark of the film and I begin to dread that the only thing that I am waiting for is an eventual reveal that will not come for another half hour... which I am right. Instead, Pedro Almodovar wants to explore who Ana is, how she conceived (which is interesting), who her mother is, what that means about maternal instinct, and explore and unconventional parenting situation essentially with two mothers separated by a generational divide pivoting around a switched at birth secret. Now that sounds interesting.... except, I couldn't stop thinking to myself "Why isn't she saying anything?" The answer: "Oh, no reason. There just wouldn't be a film if she did."
Side-note: I have a theory about films that essentially begin with situations involving two people who happen to meet. You can tell that certain films begin with this germ of an idea in the mind of the writer/director of a meeting, perhaps even the scene. Some films use that situation as a launching pad to an even greater story. Strangers on a Train jumps to mind. Other films spend the rest of the film exploring the set-up. It's easy to see how Parallel Mothers could be the former, but it's clearly the latter. Unless that situation spins out a narrative tension that just works for me, I find that kind of film to be as frustrating as anything else. Cruz lying about the true parentage could be that if other things were happening beyond... she just isn't ready to tell her The One Thing yet. And I got very bored waiting for The One Thing to happen. "Oh, they're hooking up now? Great! When's The One Thing happening."
This is also very frustrating because Parallel Mother is tackling (or at least talking about) some very interesting ideas about motherhood and about the past perpetuating itself in an endless cycle. Cruz speaks of a long history of fraught limbs on the family tree and she meets another woman at a younger part in her life who is in the midst of the same process. But the problem to me isn't that he's exploring these ideas. The problem to me is that he's just talking about them. And by the time the film ditches the switched at birth bits, he moves onto the exhuming of the graves part and... well, the ending is unearned. We'll leave it at that.
Anyway, the best thing about this film is that it's a Pedro Almodovar film. It's beautiful. It's well-acted. At all times, you're in the hands of a confident director. Penelope Cruz is quite good. I can't really begrudge her any awards. Milena Smith is good as well although to be honest I don't think Pedro Almodovar really understands her beyond "she's young, under confident, and a bit dumb." When we learn the nature of the parentage, I had to ask myself "Where are her friends in this?" Is she a country girl?
I suspect that one's mileage with Parallel Mothers might depend on how bothered one gets at getting ahead of the plot. Parallel Mothers is a switched at birth story. It makes total sense that Pedro Almodovar would tell this story at some point. You'd think "Okay, once the "switched at birth" part gets out, Pedro is going to really cut loose." But you'd be wrong.That's almost the whole story save for an epilogue that I'll get back to. The film starts off promisingly enough as Penelope Cruz's photographer seeks out a Arturo (married) who can help her (basically; I know I'm going to get some of this wrong) exhume the unmarked grave of her great grandfather and his family who were killed by the fascists and give them the proper burial they deserve, and before long the two of them begin having sex; cut to pregnant about-to-pop Penelope Cruz. Everything I just wrote is excellent. I love how it ties the search for the past into having a family, which is essentially creating the future. While in the hospital, middle-aged Penelope Cruz (weird to say that) gives birth at the same time as a younger woman named Ana, they form a friendship, and part ways. Penelope Cruz has her baby and informs Arturo, who remarks that the baby looks nothing like him and thus he cannot be the father. Almodovar touched on something very compelling in the idea of a baby's developing features being the launch of a mystery. I liked that. But it's played a little slowly, which is about to become a trend.
Even if I didn't know it was a switched at birth story, there's no way anyone could watch this without wondering "Hey, I wonder if they were switched at birth." Cruz does a maternity test and comes up negative. She is not the mother! Okay, they're switched at birth. Time to tell Ana. But instead, Ana comes back into Penelope Cruz's life. And we learn that Ana's baby has died, which means Cruz's real baby has died. Horrific. Does she tell Ana? No. Because Cruz is about to fire her au pair, Cruz hires Ana to take care of the baby... and yet doesn't inform Ana that her baby is switched at birth. Instead, she takes a cotton swab of Ana's mouth. Somehow Ana doesn't ask "What the fuck are you doing?" and confirms that Ana is the mother of the child. Does Cruz tell her? No. Around this point, we are nearing the one hour mark of the film and I begin to dread that the only thing that I am waiting for is an eventual reveal that will not come for another half hour... which I am right. Instead, Pedro Almodovar wants to explore who Ana is, how she conceived (which is interesting), who her mother is, what that means about maternal instinct, and explore and unconventional parenting situation essentially with two mothers separated by a generational divide pivoting around a switched at birth secret. Now that sounds interesting.... except, I couldn't stop thinking to myself "Why isn't she saying anything?" The answer: "Oh, no reason. There just wouldn't be a film if she did."
Side-note: I have a theory about films that essentially begin with situations involving two people who happen to meet. You can tell that certain films begin with this germ of an idea in the mind of the writer/director of a meeting, perhaps even the scene. Some films use that situation as a launching pad to an even greater story. Strangers on a Train jumps to mind. Other films spend the rest of the film exploring the set-up. It's easy to see how Parallel Mothers could be the former, but it's clearly the latter. Unless that situation spins out a narrative tension that just works for me, I find that kind of film to be as frustrating as anything else. Cruz lying about the true parentage could be that if other things were happening beyond... she just isn't ready to tell her The One Thing yet. And I got very bored waiting for The One Thing to happen. "Oh, they're hooking up now? Great! When's The One Thing happening."
This is also very frustrating because Parallel Mother is tackling (or at least talking about) some very interesting ideas about motherhood and about the past perpetuating itself in an endless cycle. Cruz speaks of a long history of fraught limbs on the family tree and she meets another woman at a younger part in her life who is in the midst of the same process. But the problem to me isn't that he's exploring these ideas. The problem to me is that he's just talking about them. And by the time the film ditches the switched at birth bits, he moves onto the exhuming of the graves part and... well, the ending is unearned. We'll leave it at that.
Anyway, the best thing about this film is that it's a Pedro Almodovar film. It's beautiful. It's well-acted. At all times, you're in the hands of a confident director. Penelope Cruz is quite good. I can't really begrudge her any awards. Milena Smith is good as well although to be honest I don't think Pedro Almodovar really understands her beyond "she's young, under confident, and a bit dumb." When we learn the nature of the parentage, I had to ask myself "Where are her friends in this?" Is she a country girl?
"How's the despair?"
Re: Parallel Mothers
Really looking forward to this one. I was somewhat disappointed with Pain and Glory, his follow up to Julieta a movie I consider his best since Talk to Her.
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Re: Parallel Mothers
Hollywood Reporter, also solid. Overall, not quite at Pain and Glory level, but well above the moderate level of some early-in-the-decade efforts.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 235006665/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 235006665/
Re: Parallel Mothers
Owen Gleiberman calls it Almodovar's best since All About My Mother. He also says it's a good thing that he's left "camp and irony" behind, making one wonder if he actually likes Pedro Almodovar.
‘Parallel Mothers’ Review: Pedro Almodóvar’s Best Since ‘All About My Mother’
The director leaves camp and irony behind to tell the luminous but down-to-earth tale of two women, played by Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit, who navigate the joy and pain of motherhood.
Among the multiple pop sources and forms that Pedro Almodóvar has always poured, like some slightly mad chef, into his movies, one that looms particularly large is the soap opera. I have often described his aesthetic, especially back in his bad-boy days, as Telemundo on peyote. Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers,” which opens the 78th Venice Film Festival tonight, tells the story of two women, both single mothers, who give birth to baby daughters at virtually the same moment (they’re roommates on a maternity ward in Madrid), and it’s a film of cascading twists and turns, of thickening complication, of high family drama. Hearing that, you might imagine that it’s a movie of high comedy as well — a giddy and ironic Almodóvarian stew of maternal diva melodrama. But “Parallel Mothers,” while it keeps us hooked on what’s happening with a showman’s finesse, is not a comedy. It’s not an over-the-top Pedro party. It’s an unabashedly serious movie, one so straightforwardly sculpted and emotionally down-to-earth that there’s no distance between the audience and what’s happening onscreen.
Almodóvar, who is 71, has left camp and irony behind before, but I confess that I wasn’t a fan of “Pain and Glory” (2019), in which Antonio Banderas played an Almodóvar surrogate who was up to his eyeballs in problems; the movie, in my opinion, was riddled with a kind of sodden self-pity. “Parallel Mothers” is as serious as any film Almodóvar has made, but in this case he hasn’t let go of his luminously light, beguiling, puckish side. The picture draws you in and holds you. It’s Almodóvar’s disarmingly moving tribute to the shifting, ever-bending bonds of motherhood, to the inexorable pull of family, and it may prove to be his most popular film since “All About My Mother” (1999), even though it couldn’t be more different in tone.
When we first meet Janis (Penelope Cruz), a professional photographer who’s approaching 40, and Ana (Milena Smit), who is still in her teens, we assume they must be opposites in some essential way. But that would be the formula for a schlock vision; these two overlap as much as they don’t. Both, it turns out, became pregnant accidentally. Janis was having an affair with Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a forensic anthropologist who’s facilitating the excavation of the unmarked grave of her grandfather (and nine other relatives), who were among the 100,000 citizens who went “missing” during the Spanish Civil War and the brutal reign of Francisco Franco that emerged from it. That crime — state-sanctioned murder that ripped families apart — is the film’s backdrop. Arturo, with his angelic beard and glasses, seems a gentle, caring soul, but he’s married, with a wife who’s battling cancer, so when Janis announces that she’s expecting and that she intends to have the child, he can’t be there for her. That’s okay; she’ll do it on her own. And despite the less than ideal circumstances, she’s happy with her decision.
Ana, by contrast, starts off in a state of fretful despair. It turns out that she became pregnant in a highly traumatized way (several young men coerced her into sleeping with them under the threat of leaking a sex tape), and as an adolescent from a severely broken home, she feels woefully unprepared for what she’s about to go through. But Janis tells her not to worry, that she’ll embrace it. And she turns out to be right.
In “Parallel Mothers,” Almodóvar is a master storyteller who looks at single motherhood through a lens of domestic suspense. There’s no false conflict, no hyping of the action. “Parallel Mothers” recognizes that Janis and Ana are each taking on an immense burden, and as their situations unfold, the film keeps us in touch with how the passion, the anxiety, and the logistics of motherhood are all intertwined. Cruz acts this part with a mood-shifting immediacy that leaves you breathless. First she’s an I-am-woman warrior who will meet every challenge. Then she’s a testy multitasker with a flaky au pair who never seems to do enough. Then she’s a loving but desperate parent who feels abandoned by fate. Then, after Arturo visits and comes away somehow feeling that he’s not the father of this swarthy baby girl (does she look so dark because of Janis’s Venezuelan grandfather?), Janis learns why that might be, and both she and the audience are in for a shock.
That’s the film’s first grand twist. It’s followed by another that’s even more shocking in its casual extremity. Yet even as we want to cry out in protest and say, “Come on, that wouldn’t happen,” we realize, in fact, that it could happen. That it does happen. “Parallel Mothers” is a movie that engages life and death, capturing the rotating primal drama that being a parent really is.
Slowly, inexorably, Janis and Ana are drawn together: as comrade mothers, as collaborators on the making of potato omelets, and as more than that. Milena Smit endows Ana with a Gen-Z defiance that’s both obstinate and admirable. She starts off as a girl, but we see how motherhood recasts her soul, taking away her terror and replacing it with strength and focus. For a while, Ana is helped out by her own mother, Teresa, but she’s a narcissistic aspiring actress — played with no-fuss moody magnetism by Aitana Sánchez-Gijón — who has gotten the chance to be in a play that will take her to the provinces. And damned if she’s going to let a little thing like helping take care of her daughter’s infant get in the way. That said, families are all about need, and Janis and Ana start to prop each other up. Almodóvar, not usually a pop-music maven, makes transporting use of Janis Joplin’s version of “Summertime” (it turns out that Janis was named for her), using it to reference how the 1960s permanently scrambled our family values into something at once new, chaotic, and in certain ways better.
The political dimension of “Parallel Mothers” is quite powerful — a howl of rage, and an exposé (literally, as the unmarked grave of Janis’s family is laid open) of the Franco regime’s atrocities. But you may wonder, at first, how it’s connected to the rest of the movie. Two women joining forces to confront the joy and pain of motherhood; the historical murder of civilians. They’re connected because “Parallel Mothers” is really about how the drive that moves us to sustain our families, whatever the challenge, is nothing less than the life force, drawn from generations and held within us. At the end, when the film visibly unifies that force, it’s one of Almodóvar’s most transporting moments.
‘Parallel Mothers’ Review: Pedro Almodóvar’s Best Since ‘All About My Mother’
The director leaves camp and irony behind to tell the luminous but down-to-earth tale of two women, played by Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit, who navigate the joy and pain of motherhood.
Among the multiple pop sources and forms that Pedro Almodóvar has always poured, like some slightly mad chef, into his movies, one that looms particularly large is the soap opera. I have often described his aesthetic, especially back in his bad-boy days, as Telemundo on peyote. Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers,” which opens the 78th Venice Film Festival tonight, tells the story of two women, both single mothers, who give birth to baby daughters at virtually the same moment (they’re roommates on a maternity ward in Madrid), and it’s a film of cascading twists and turns, of thickening complication, of high family drama. Hearing that, you might imagine that it’s a movie of high comedy as well — a giddy and ironic Almodóvarian stew of maternal diva melodrama. But “Parallel Mothers,” while it keeps us hooked on what’s happening with a showman’s finesse, is not a comedy. It’s not an over-the-top Pedro party. It’s an unabashedly serious movie, one so straightforwardly sculpted and emotionally down-to-earth that there’s no distance between the audience and what’s happening onscreen.
Almodóvar, who is 71, has left camp and irony behind before, but I confess that I wasn’t a fan of “Pain and Glory” (2019), in which Antonio Banderas played an Almodóvar surrogate who was up to his eyeballs in problems; the movie, in my opinion, was riddled with a kind of sodden self-pity. “Parallel Mothers” is as serious as any film Almodóvar has made, but in this case he hasn’t let go of his luminously light, beguiling, puckish side. The picture draws you in and holds you. It’s Almodóvar’s disarmingly moving tribute to the shifting, ever-bending bonds of motherhood, to the inexorable pull of family, and it may prove to be his most popular film since “All About My Mother” (1999), even though it couldn’t be more different in tone.
When we first meet Janis (Penelope Cruz), a professional photographer who’s approaching 40, and Ana (Milena Smit), who is still in her teens, we assume they must be opposites in some essential way. But that would be the formula for a schlock vision; these two overlap as much as they don’t. Both, it turns out, became pregnant accidentally. Janis was having an affair with Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a forensic anthropologist who’s facilitating the excavation of the unmarked grave of her grandfather (and nine other relatives), who were among the 100,000 citizens who went “missing” during the Spanish Civil War and the brutal reign of Francisco Franco that emerged from it. That crime — state-sanctioned murder that ripped families apart — is the film’s backdrop. Arturo, with his angelic beard and glasses, seems a gentle, caring soul, but he’s married, with a wife who’s battling cancer, so when Janis announces that she’s expecting and that she intends to have the child, he can’t be there for her. That’s okay; she’ll do it on her own. And despite the less than ideal circumstances, she’s happy with her decision.
Ana, by contrast, starts off in a state of fretful despair. It turns out that she became pregnant in a highly traumatized way (several young men coerced her into sleeping with them under the threat of leaking a sex tape), and as an adolescent from a severely broken home, she feels woefully unprepared for what she’s about to go through. But Janis tells her not to worry, that she’ll embrace it. And she turns out to be right.
In “Parallel Mothers,” Almodóvar is a master storyteller who looks at single motherhood through a lens of domestic suspense. There’s no false conflict, no hyping of the action. “Parallel Mothers” recognizes that Janis and Ana are each taking on an immense burden, and as their situations unfold, the film keeps us in touch with how the passion, the anxiety, and the logistics of motherhood are all intertwined. Cruz acts this part with a mood-shifting immediacy that leaves you breathless. First she’s an I-am-woman warrior who will meet every challenge. Then she’s a testy multitasker with a flaky au pair who never seems to do enough. Then she’s a loving but desperate parent who feels abandoned by fate. Then, after Arturo visits and comes away somehow feeling that he’s not the father of this swarthy baby girl (does she look so dark because of Janis’s Venezuelan grandfather?), Janis learns why that might be, and both she and the audience are in for a shock.
That’s the film’s first grand twist. It’s followed by another that’s even more shocking in its casual extremity. Yet even as we want to cry out in protest and say, “Come on, that wouldn’t happen,” we realize, in fact, that it could happen. That it does happen. “Parallel Mothers” is a movie that engages life and death, capturing the rotating primal drama that being a parent really is.
Slowly, inexorably, Janis and Ana are drawn together: as comrade mothers, as collaborators on the making of potato omelets, and as more than that. Milena Smit endows Ana with a Gen-Z defiance that’s both obstinate and admirable. She starts off as a girl, but we see how motherhood recasts her soul, taking away her terror and replacing it with strength and focus. For a while, Ana is helped out by her own mother, Teresa, but she’s a narcissistic aspiring actress — played with no-fuss moody magnetism by Aitana Sánchez-Gijón — who has gotten the chance to be in a play that will take her to the provinces. And damned if she’s going to let a little thing like helping take care of her daughter’s infant get in the way. That said, families are all about need, and Janis and Ana start to prop each other up. Almodóvar, not usually a pop-music maven, makes transporting use of Janis Joplin’s version of “Summertime” (it turns out that Janis was named for her), using it to reference how the 1960s permanently scrambled our family values into something at once new, chaotic, and in certain ways better.
The political dimension of “Parallel Mothers” is quite powerful — a howl of rage, and an exposé (literally, as the unmarked grave of Janis’s family is laid open) of the Franco regime’s atrocities. But you may wonder, at first, how it’s connected to the rest of the movie. Two women joining forces to confront the joy and pain of motherhood; the historical murder of civilians. They’re connected because “Parallel Mothers” is really about how the drive that moves us to sustain our families, whatever the challenge, is nothing less than the life force, drawn from generations and held within us. At the end, when the film visibly unifies that force, it’s one of Almodóvar’s most transporting moments.
"How's the despair?"
Parallel Mothers
Looks like a winner. Words like "warm" are thrown about, which might be another way of saying "low-key."
GUARDIAN: ****/5
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/s ... m-festival
Parallel Mothers review – Almodóvar delivers Venice film festival a little bundle of joy
Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz open the festival with a boisterous, warm-bodied swapped-at-birth melodrama about two single women who meet in a maternity ward
he first day of the Venice film festival is an excitable, expectant affair. The staff wear medical masks, the cinemas have been sanitised and the guests mass at the door like anxious family members outside a maternity ward. Happily they are in good hands; Pedro Almodóvar is the midwife. He delivers an opening night picture that is positively ringing with life.
Showcasing a sure-footed performance from Penélope Cruz, Parallel Mothers shapes up as a boisterous swapped-at-birth melodrama, full of mix-ups and moral quandaries, occasionally tilting towards farce. But first appearances are deceptive and the film belies its high-concept conceit. All newborns, we’re told, carry the ghosts of the past in their genes – and so it is with Almodóvar’s latest, which is knotted and subversive; an autopsy of dark Spanish history dressed up as a bright baby shower. It’s a turbulent movie. The ingredients don’t always gel. But it is so generous of spirit that it would be churlish to complain. Most directors give so little. Almodóvar, by contrast, offers an over-abundance of riches.
PAYWALL BELOW:
INDIEWIRE: B+
‘Parallel Mothers’ Review: Almodóvar Serves Up Cinematic Comfort Food with an Emotional Punch
Venice: One of Almodóvar's breezier and more accessible domestic affairs still finds its way toward some hefty drama.
Nicholas Barber
Pedro Almodóvar has made some radical and transgressive films in his time, but it’s fair to say that “Parallel Mothers” isn’t one of them. Not that that’s a complaint. The opening film at this year’s Venice Film Festival, “Parallel Mothers” offers many delights, one of which is that it ushers Almodóvar fans back to his comfortingly familiar milieu.
Once again, we get to settle into those stylish apartments and pavement cafes in sunny Madrid (the film is set between 2016 and 2018, so there’s not a face mask in sight); we get to admire the to-die-for furniture and the snazzy clothes which just happen to have some vibrant reds, blues, greens, and yellows; we get to hear Alberto Iglesias’s palpitating orchestral music as the plot twists and tightens; and we get to see a tousled Penélope Cruz acting up a storm, while looking superhumanly gorgeous: her flicking false eyelashes deserve an award of their own.
This is undoubtedly one of Almódovar’s breezier and more accessible domestic dramas. It was shot in and around Madrid in just one month this spring, and the most rebellious thing about the whole project is the poster’s image of a lactating nipple which upset the prudes at Instagram: the film itself is more discreet. But weighty concerns work their way into the story. And in the mean time, la casa de Almódovar is one of cinema’s most inviting places to be.
https://www.indiewire.com/2021/09/paral ... a5564ecf9a
GUARDIAN: ****/5
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/s ... m-festival
Parallel Mothers review – Almodóvar delivers Venice film festival a little bundle of joy
Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz open the festival with a boisterous, warm-bodied swapped-at-birth melodrama about two single women who meet in a maternity ward
he first day of the Venice film festival is an excitable, expectant affair. The staff wear medical masks, the cinemas have been sanitised and the guests mass at the door like anxious family members outside a maternity ward. Happily they are in good hands; Pedro Almodóvar is the midwife. He delivers an opening night picture that is positively ringing with life.
Showcasing a sure-footed performance from Penélope Cruz, Parallel Mothers shapes up as a boisterous swapped-at-birth melodrama, full of mix-ups and moral quandaries, occasionally tilting towards farce. But first appearances are deceptive and the film belies its high-concept conceit. All newborns, we’re told, carry the ghosts of the past in their genes – and so it is with Almodóvar’s latest, which is knotted and subversive; an autopsy of dark Spanish history dressed up as a bright baby shower. It’s a turbulent movie. The ingredients don’t always gel. But it is so generous of spirit that it would be churlish to complain. Most directors give so little. Almodóvar, by contrast, offers an over-abundance of riches.
PAYWALL BELOW:
INDIEWIRE: B+
‘Parallel Mothers’ Review: Almodóvar Serves Up Cinematic Comfort Food with an Emotional Punch
Venice: One of Almodóvar's breezier and more accessible domestic affairs still finds its way toward some hefty drama.
Nicholas Barber
Pedro Almodóvar has made some radical and transgressive films in his time, but it’s fair to say that “Parallel Mothers” isn’t one of them. Not that that’s a complaint. The opening film at this year’s Venice Film Festival, “Parallel Mothers” offers many delights, one of which is that it ushers Almodóvar fans back to his comfortingly familiar milieu.
Once again, we get to settle into those stylish apartments and pavement cafes in sunny Madrid (the film is set between 2016 and 2018, so there’s not a face mask in sight); we get to admire the to-die-for furniture and the snazzy clothes which just happen to have some vibrant reds, blues, greens, and yellows; we get to hear Alberto Iglesias’s palpitating orchestral music as the plot twists and tightens; and we get to see a tousled Penélope Cruz acting up a storm, while looking superhumanly gorgeous: her flicking false eyelashes deserve an award of their own.
This is undoubtedly one of Almódovar’s breezier and more accessible domestic dramas. It was shot in and around Madrid in just one month this spring, and the most rebellious thing about the whole project is the poster’s image of a lactating nipple which upset the prudes at Instagram: the film itself is more discreet. But weighty concerns work their way into the story. And in the mean time, la casa de Almódovar is one of cinema’s most inviting places to be.
https://www.indiewire.com/2021/09/paral ... a5564ecf9a
"How's the despair?"