I really wanted to watch this movie called Parallel Mothers, which was directed by Pedro Almodovar. I saw his 2007 film Volver, which stars Penelope Cruz, and I was so blown away by the acting that I wanted to watch another movie of his. I remember having a leftover ballot from the 2022 Academy Awards, and Parallel Mothers was on the list of nominations, specifically for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Penelope Cruz.) The movie is pretty intense like Volver, but the acting was incredible. Penelope Cruz is an amazing actress and I really liked Pedro Almodovar’s directing style because it is just so unique. As someone who is trying to improve my Spanish, watching this movie with English subtitles and hearing the dialogue really helped.
The movie takes place in Madrid, Spain and opens with a photo shoot. Janis is a professional photographer, and she is working closely with an archaeologist named Arturo. She is trying to dig deeper into her family history and so she enlists Arturo to help her. Many of her family members were killed during the regime of Nationalist leader Francisco Franco and she wants to uncover what happened to her relatives. Arturo agrees to help her out and they end up hooking up one day. The next scene cuts to when Janis is going into labor and she is in the same room as a young woman named Ana. They talk and find out they share a lot in common even though Janis is in her 40s and Ana is a teenager. The main thing they share is that they are both single and unmarried, but while Janis has no regrets about becoming pregnant and becoming a mom, Ana does have regrets, and we find out why when we meet her mother, Teresa, who is an accomplished actress. After they give birth and are recovering in the hospital, Janis and Ana exchange numbers and promise to stay in touch. Time passes and they are taking care of the babies and navigating the challenges of motherhood. However, when Janis meets with Arturo he tells her that he may not be the biological father of her baby, so Janis takes a paternity test and finds out that she in fact is not the biological mother of her newborn daughter, Cecilia. Meanwhile, Teresa is going on tour, and she has to leave Madrid, leaving Ana on her own for an extended period of time. Ana hears Teresa arguing over the phone about her father leaving Teresa to take care of Ana by herself, and she becomes even more resentful of her mother, which prompts her to leave home and start a new life by herself.
When Janis comes to the cafe that Ana is working at, they reconnect and agree to meet at Janis’s house. When they meet, they get to see Cecilia (Ana still doesn’t know about the paternity test results) and when Janis asks about Ana’s daughter, Anita, Ana tells her that Anita died from crib death and the two of them grieve the loss of Anita. Janis and Ana start to spend more time together as Janis and Arturo start to get farther apart, and they end up sleeping together after getting drunk to Janis Joplin, but Janis still carries a heavy burden from not telling Ana about how she (Janis) isn’t Cecilia’s biological mother. Janis starts to meet up more often with Arturo to talk about the excavation project and Arturo confesses that he separated from his wife after she recovered from cancer so he can be with Janis, but now Janis is not sure where she stands with Arturo and she’s not sure if she’s romantically interested in Ana, either. After asking Janis why she is becoming so distant from her, Janis finally lets Ana see the results of the maternity test and Ana finds out that she is Cecilia’s real mother and Janis’s daughter, Anita, died of crib death. (Long story short, their babies were switched at birth.) Ana walks out on Janis because she feels betrayed that Janis had her daughter and that she had to deal with this painful grief when in reality, her actual daughter was alive and well. However, they somehow end up patching things up and Arturo helps Janis excavate the remains of her family members and everyone has a memorial for them. The movie in a lot of ways reminded me of Volver because both films deal with grief and the consequences of keeping secrets from people. In Volver, two women, Raimunda and Sole, are grieving the loss of their parents in a fire that happened in a village a few years ago. But their neighbor, Agustina, suspects that their mother might actually be alive, and not only that but Agustina’s mom had an affair with Raimunda’s father. Sure enough, when Sole is driving her car home, she finds her mother, Irene, hiding in the trunk, alive and well. Sole, however, decides to not tell Raimunda that her daughter that Irene is still alive, so it’s not surprising that when Raimunda finds out that Irene is alive, she feels really hurt that her mother lied about her death and that Sole kept her mother’s real story from her for years, leaving Raimunda to carry a lot of unprocessed hurt and resentment towards her family for years. It’s not until Irene tells Raimunda everything about what happened to her and her father that Raimunda is able to heal from a lot of deep wounds and trauma that she carried for so many years. It was painful to learn that Raimunda’s father sexually abused her and got her pregnant with Isabella, it really showed me how deeply rooted a lot of this sexual abuse and trauma was in Raimunda and Sole’s family. Not only that, but it was painful for Raimunda at first to learn that her father was having an affair with Agustina’s mother, prompting Irene to set fire to the hut that they were sleeping in. Irene also carried a lot of emotional luggage and she also had not processed it, and the sad part is that she didn’t find out about Raimunda’s father’s sexual abuse until Aunt Paula told her, so Irene carried this guilt and shame for not doing something to stop the abuse and at the same time Raimunda was carrying around a lot of pain and shame in silence, so she wasn’t communicating with her family. Like Raimunda, Janis suffers in silence by keeping it a secret from Ana about their babies being switched, and Ana feels betrayed that Janis kept it a secret from her for so long. At the beginning, it seemed that Ana and Janis were becoming fast friends because they shared so much in common, especially because they were giving birth in the same room together, but they end up having a very complicated relationship later on the more they open up to each other and it really hurts Ana that Janis didn’t tell her that she wasn’t Cecilia’s biological mother and that Ana actually was. Ana doesn’t really have anyone she can lean on or trust. Her mother is away on tour, her father won’t communicate with her, and she opens up to Janis that at a high school party, a guy and her had sex and her classmates filmed in, and two of her male classmates raped her and she got pregnant by one of the guys at the party. Janis seems to empathize with what Ana is going through and especially when they are giving birth, it’s a lonely and painful experience so Ana feels like she doesn’t have to go through her painful labor alone because there is another woman going through it with her. But Janis still hadn’t resolved her situation with Arturo so she wasn’t able to commit to Ana in the way Ana wanted her to. There is a flashback to where Janis is telling Arturo that she is pregnant and Arturo is telling her she doesn’t have to have the baby and reveals that it wouldn’t be the best time to tell his wife that he was having an affair with Janis and got her pregnant, especially because his wife had cancer. However, Janis is in her 40s and has wanted to be a mom for a really long time, so she decides to have the baby and cut off contact with Arturo. But Arturo keeps popping back into Janis’s life, and even though he is her colleague and they are working on a project together, they still were interested in each other and Arturo decides to tell his wife about his affair and separate from her so that he can be with Janis, but by this point Janis and Ana have fallen in love, so Janis really isn’t sure who she truly loves and she doesn’t really want to commit. I think that is where the movie left me hanging, but maybe it wasn’t supposed to be neatly tied up. The ending of Almodovar’s movie Julieta didn’t end neatly, and neither did Volver. I was still left with a lot of burning questions after each film. But I think that is what I love about watching all these different films and getting to read more about them, is because each director has their own unique directing style. I think getting to watch Pedro Almodovar’s films has helped me appreciate his unique approach to making movies. I remember I wasn’t used to Yorgos Lanthimos’s directing style at first; the opening scene of The Lobster features a woman randomly shooting a donkey and killing it, and at first, I found this upsetting and found myself thinking, What the actual fuck?!? That poor donkey wasn’t hurting anybody. But then I got to know the struggles of each character in the film, and I started to feel connected to Colin Farrell’s character in the movie, who struggles to fit in in a society that doesn’t accept being single or unmarried. Seeing how single people were being poorly treated and discriminated against throughout the movie was pretty disturbing, but in real life single people do face a lot of stigma and often feel pressured to get married or have children. Probably not to the extent that there is an actual dystopian society where singles get turned into animals if they don’t find a life partner, but definitely enough to make single people feel like they are broken or incomplete for being themselves. Then I saw Yorgos’ other film, The Favourite, and I started to get slightly more familiar with his directing style, and watching the featurette at the end of the film helped me understand how the director worked with actors, what it was like directing different scenes, how the costume department made all the different clothes, and so many other elements of the movie that I wouldn’t have known based on my own interpretation of the movie alone. The Favourite was a bold film that, like Parallel Mothers, made it a point to explore sexual fluidity and love. At first it seems that Rachel Weisz’s character, Sarah, is the favorite of Queen Anne, and they are in love with each other. But then Emma Stone’s character, Abigail, who is Sarah’s cousin, comes to work as a servant for Queen Anne and she ends up being Queen Anne’s confidant and lover, pushing Sarah to the side. However, the movie shows how Queen Anne is really playing both of these ladies and pitting them against each other, making them compete for her approval and love. Olivia Coleman won an Academy Award for her role as Queen Anne and seriously, she deserved it because her acting was fierce and just so…incredible. Parallel Mothers also challenged my ideas about love and relationships, because Janis wasn’t committed to being with one person, and she was able to explore her feelings for Ana that went deeper than their first meeting in the hospital room. Even after they fight and Janis breaks her heart, Ana continues to be with her. This challenged this idea that I had about relationships, because as someone with very limited romantic relationship experience, it seemed that love and romance was very black and white. You fall in love at first sight, you commit to someone, you get married and you grow old and die together. And when you break up with someone, you just get over the person and find someone new. But watching this movie showed me that relationships are pretty complicated and messy and you never fully disentangle yourself from the person even after separating with them. Arturo continued to come back into Janis’ life even after she told him they needed to stop communicating, and even after Ana left Janis’s house, they still stayed close. Honestly it was really interesting seeing how these relationships were so deeply connected to one another.
One scene I found it hard to get through was the scene where Janis and Ana were giving birth. As someone who has never delivered babies or given birth, it was pretty painful to watch Janis and Ana deliver the babies because they were in so much pain. It reminded me of the episode in this show I am watching called Lessons in Chemistry because at the beginning, Elizabeth Zott gives birth to her daughter, Mad, and she is in so much pain even when they give her an epidural. She imagines her late husband, Calvin, encouraging her through the labor, but when she is actually giving birth, I had to remember that she is still pushing a full-sized human out of her body, and it is painful. I am not ruling out having children, but watching the scenes made me appreciate the women (and also people of other genders who conceive and have children) who go through the process of labor and childbirth, because it doesn’t look easy. I remember as a kid watching this series on Oxygen called Birth Stories, and it showed women going through labor and childbirth. It was fascinating to watch but also as a kid it was pretty intense to witness. I think that is what I appreciate about this movie, Parallel Mothers, because it challenged a lot of my perspective on motherhood. Like, how would I feel if I gave birth in the same room as a woman who I felt an emotional connection with, but it turned out that our babies got switched and I was raising her baby as my own? I am sure it has happened in real life, but it made for a very intriguing and emotionally charged film.
Parallel Mothers. 2021. Thriller/ Drama. Runtime: 2 hours. Rated R for some sexuality.
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