Parallel Mothers

Penelope Cruz and Milena Smit are Parallel Mothers

Pedro Almodóvar's Parallel Mothers is an effective melodrama and showcase for Penelope Cruz that seems overladen with cultural baggage. Almodovar has long ceased to be the transgressive provocateur of his youth. That mantle has been passed to Bertrand Mandico, Julia Ducournau, and a host of others. Rather, Almodovar has spent the second half of his career reworking  his themes in a host of genres including broad comedy (I'm So Exited), horror (The Skin I Live In), the psychological suspense thriller (Julieta) , but most fruitfully in melodrama. This female centric genre is a good fit for Pedro because, though he does love the beautiful boys, his empathy is more often extended to women in his films; most especially mothers.

Parallel Mothers is filled to the brim with melodramatic tropes: infants switched at birth, family secrets, and fades to black. Almodovar is in his wheelhouse here and Cruz, in her eighth film with Almodovar, is relaxed enough to bring off a full blooded embodiment of a flawed heroine who has her reasons. Almodovar undercuts his younger mother, Milena Smit, with an unbelievable backstory involving gang rape and a narcissistic mother. Like the expensive bric a brac that fills his coddled characters' apartments, Almodovar tends to overload his films. Whether it be homoerotic canvases by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida or the entire subplot of a mass Spanish Civil War grave, there are many elements in Parallel Mothers that are not organically integrated with the main melodrama, but exist as signifiers of Almodóvar's sensibility.

One of the few aspects of the film that differentiates Parallel Mothers from a 1934 melodrama is the sapphic idyll enjoyed by the titular characters. All nice and good I say, I look forward to Eve Harrington going down on Margo Channing in the All About Eve remake, but Almodovar slights the junior partner in that relationship by ultimately pairing Cruz with the father of her child in an extremely perfunctory fashion. They are all one happy extended family and rainbow coalition at the fade out, but Parallel Mothers, despite its attractive and well fashioned surface, does not provide one much to muse about.