Giving birth to ‘Parallel Mothers’
Cruz, Almodovar open Venice film fest with their 7th film
VENICE, Italy – For “Parallel Mothers,” their seventh film together, Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz worldpremiered their Spanish-language drama Wednesday as the opening film for this 78th Venice Film Festival.
Invoking dark Spanish history and its continued after-effects from the nation’s 1930s civil war, “Mothers” chronicles the dilemmas of Cruz’s photographer who suddenly finds herself a single mother with a devastating secret.
With nods to Shakespeare, Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann and blues icon Janis Joplin, for whom Cruz’s character is named, “Mothers” is, as always with this filmmaker, personal.
The women on view in “Parallel Mothers” are notably different from those Almodovar created decades earlier.
“Now I am more interested in imperfect mothers, the mothers who experienced a complexity that they have to solve,” the veteran writer-director said at the afternoon press conference with Cruz before the evening’s events.
“The mothers I represented before were very different. They were inspired by my mother, for example, or by the educated figures that raised me. My neighbors. All these women who were powerful.
“However,” he continued, “with (creating) the character of Penelope, the more interesting it became, the more interesting it was for me.
“The character was difficult I must admit. But based on mothers I met in my life, some who didn’t have that maternal instinct. Even if they were mothers, they were very different.”
Cruz found playing Janis, “a very intense, overwhelmingly at times, journey. A ‘present’ Pedro made to me.”
Janis can be temperamental, dismissive of others, hateful even. But her love for her baby is never in doubt.
“When I read the screenplay I said to myself, Pedro has once again written a piece that is a wonder. It’s a very difficult character, one of the most difficult I’ve ever interpreted.
“But I never felt I was alone. We worked for months together. It’s rare to find a director who will grant so much time to his actors. He is like an artisan when he works with us.
“Sometimes he says I suffer too much when we start filming. There are something things that emerge when you take your job very seriously and face your character in a humble manner. You have to discover parts of yourself.”
As to why Almodovar felt now was the time to talk about the common graves of the “disappeared,” the murder victims of the civil war, “Historical memory is something left suspended in Spanish society,” he said.
“There is still this unresolved debt in resolving the disappeared, the people buried in common ground. It’s a topic I’m interested in.”