Parallel Mothers (2021)

Pedro Almodóvar's Parallel Mothers arrives with the confidence of a director who has nothing left to prove and a few things left to say. Penélope Cruz plays Janis, a photographer who becomes pregnant by a forensic anthropologist and shares a maternity ward with Ana, a frightened teenager. The babies are swapped. The revelation is handled with the director's customary soap-opera composure, which is to say it lands like a slap delivered with impeccable manners. The film is thoroughly female-centered, concerned with single motherhood by choice, bodily autonomy, and the fraught tenderness between women, though it wears these concerns as a lived-in garment instead of a placard.

The queer current running beneath the second act is unmistakably Almodóvar, and the physical frankness of the film, breastfeeding, pregnancy, the poster that Instagram briefly found intolerable, is presented without ceremony. There is no sermon on body image here. Only bodies. Where the film does raise its voice, it does so about the past. The parallel strand concerning a mass grave from the White Terror, and the exhumation of Janis's great-grandfather, gives the melodrama a civic spine. Almodóvar has said he speaks through Cruz to tell the truth about Spain, and the script does argue, pointedly, for confronting what was buried. The argument is dramatized more than declared, but it is an argument all the same.

Absent entirely are the economic grievances, the racial reckonings, the climate anxieties, and the neurodivergent arcs that occupy so much of contemporary cinema's attention. This is a Spanish film about Spanish wounds, staffed by a Spanish ensemble and indifferent to any other accounting. The result is a melodrama of unusual gravity, sincere in its grief and disciplined in its politics. We are left, as so often with this director, admiring the embroidery while wondering whether the garment needed quite so many threads.