Parallel Mothers

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Running time: 2hrs | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Starring Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit

I consider it almost impossible to write at any length about this film without telling you things I would personally rather not know before watching it. If this is the first write-up of Parallel Mothers that you’ve stumbled across, great! Read no others — yet. Not because what I have written here is the last word on this film, but because I hope it is a decent first word, and you should catch up with more in-depth reviews that burrow into the premise only after experiencing the film.

Parallel Mothers is the kind of film that almost no directors, including a younger Almodóvar, would realise successfully. But Almodóvar today, benefitting from decades of experience, is able to land the plane in stormy weather, where a younger director would crash and burn. The weather in question is a perfect storm of melodramatic plot elements, complex emotional reactions, and wild deceptions, and it requires on the part of its director a simultaneous iron grip on tone, together with a certain paradoxical lightness of touch. Too easy, in other hands, for unintentional comedy to seep into proceedings. Too easy for pathos to shade into bathos. This is the kind of script that could all too plausibly be accidentally filmed as farce. Very few directors early in their career can handle this kind of material with the requisite grace and control, and most directors later in their professional lives tend to shy away from it in favour of more obvious gravitas and weight. 

Parallel Mothers showcases an intensely compassionate Almodóvar; his regular DoP José Luis Alcaine’s camera is supremely non-judgmental here, but not in the clinical style of something like The Skin I Live In — the filmmaking is intimate and supports a neatly-fashioned gallery of characters major and minor. Top honours must go to Penélope Cruz, on very watchable form as a warm and likeable woman who makes some rather outrageous choices… but there I go getting into the plot. Just see it, and enjoy observing yourself as you respond to a moving and morally chewy melodrama.

PARALLEL MOTHERS (MADRES PARALELAS) (2021) Written by Pedro Almodóvar | Shot by José Luis Alcaine | Edited by Teresa Font

Opening the 78th Venice Film Festival