Pedro Almodóvar: Unearthing the past in ‘Parallel Mothers’
Pedro Almodóvar has a theory that his films with male protagonists, like his autobiographical 2019 film “Pain and Glory,” are darker and more somber.
“I look inside myself when I talk about male characters,” says Almodóvar.
“Parallel Mothers,” which Sony Pictures Classics begins releasing in theaters Friday, returns Almodóvar to more melodramatic territory. Penelope Cruz and Milena Smit play young mothers who meet at the hospital where their newborns are accidentally switched at birth. This secret plays out in unpredictable ways while the film also investigates another hidden past: Spain’s mass graves from the Spanish Civil War.
In recent years, a national dialogue in Spain has brought renewed interest and political discord over exhuming the graves from Francisco Franco’s regime, which began with the 1930s civil war and ended with his death, in 1975. Some 19,000 of an estimated 114,000 victims have been recovered in the last four decades.
“Parallel Mothers” may not be as selfreflective as Almodóvar’s last film, but it’s the 72-year-old director’s most politically introspective movie and his first to grapple with the legacy of Franco’s reign. Almodóvar emerged as a filmmaker in Spain’s liberated post-Franco years.
When “Parallel Mothers” was screening this fall at the New York Film Festival, Almodóvar met a reporter at a midtown hotel where he spoke sometimes in English, sometimes through an interpreter, about a film that, like his 1999 masterpiece “All About My Mother,” is centrally concerned with motherhood.
“I’ll continue to be interested in mothers,” he said. “You can have a thousand different mothers, and they can birth a thousand different genres.”