Time Contributor | Joe Apple
Movies and life are won or lost with the aftertaste.
Pedro Almodóvar is a Spanish national treasure director.
Because most of the works are Spanish and have a strong personal style, they are often not well known and accepted.
Watching his films, he often faces the risk of "three views collapsing", which is filled with a lot of dog blood, and even strange plots, which always challenge the psychological bottom line of the audience.
"The Skin of My Habitat"
For example, in "All About My Mother", the father becomes a transgender person and infects his new girlfriend and son with AIDS;
In "The Skin of My Habitat", surgeon Robert performs sex reassignment surgery on rapists and avenges his daughter, which is a big surprise.
This time, in Almodóvar's new work, what kind of bizarre story does he bring us?
Parallel Mothers
(Banned posters for Tweet covers, not suitable for release)
Changing
Janis (Penelope Cruz) and Ana are both single mothers.
After giving birth at the same hospital, they accidentally hugged each other's children.
Janis was the first to discover this truth, reminded by those around him. But she did not call the police, nor did she go to the hospital for advice, but hid the matter.
Soon after, Ana's child, Anita (Janis's flesh and blood), died suddenly.
Grief-stricken, Ana runs away from home to work as a waitress in a coffee shop to earn a living, and meets Janis again.
Janis sympathizes with Ana and asks her to be a babysitter to help take care of cecilia, a child who is not related to her.
Later, Janis suspected that Ana was Cecilia's biological mother and tricked her into doing a paternity test.
The results quickly came out, confirming her suspicions: Ana was Cecilia's biological mother.
Fearing the loss of Cecilia, Janis refuses to tell Ana the truth.
Meanwhile, Ana develops feelings for Janis in her relationship with Janis. She and Janis not only shared a bed, but also raised Cecilia like lovers, and had a wonderful time.
But Janis can't stand the torture of conscience, and after a psychological struggle, she tells Ana the truth.
Ana was so angry that she immediately took Cecilia away, leaving Janis devastated...
Such a human farce of "holding the wrong child", mixed with the sudden same-sex friendship between two mothers in the middle of the section, is handled by Almodóvar quite smoothly and movingly, without the slightest feeling of dog blood.
At the end, everyone can also end with a strange reunion, which may also be a big charm of his movie.
After watching the movie, you can understand how complicated the relationship between the characters in the picture is
Femininity
Almodóvar has been hailed as a "female film director".
Behind the strange characters and bizarre plots in his films, he truly cares for women from all angles and dimensions.
The "parallel mother" in the title refers to Janis and Ana.
They are kind, autonomous, and tenacious, but they are not perfect women and perfect mothers in the traditional sense.
Janis, knowing that Arturo is a husband, still associates with him and conceives his child.
She didn't ask Arturo to be responsible for this child, and from the beginning she was ready to be a single mother.
Janis's image reflects Almodóvar's advanced view of women:
Respect women's emotional needs and desire instincts, and make both a premise for women's independent choice.
In Janis's view, the child is the crystallization of her and Arturo's love, has nothing to do with ethics, and she also wants to have a child before the age of 40.
Meanwhile, like most women in Almodóvar's films, Janis is financially independent, has a successful career, and has the ability to take responsibility for her actions without relying on men.
Parallel to Janis's fate is Ana, an underage girl.
Before giving birth, Ana told Janis that she regretted conceiving the child. But after giving birth to Anita, she quickly accepted the child and took good care of her—
This is Almodóvar's celebration of the female maternal instinct.
In Ana, Almodóvar also focused on the current female vocal dilemma:
Ana was actually conceived by three boys at school, and when Janis indignantly asked her why she didn't go to justice, Ana said:
In addition to subverting the traditional female/mother image, the women in Almodóvar's films, no matter how different their fates are, how much they love and hate each other, the background of the character relationship is always mutual care, understanding, and mutual help.
Between them, they often form invisible "women's alliances".
When Janis shoots the cover of a women's magazine, she will intimately remind guests that if they are uncomfortable, they must tell her about it.
The absence of the male figure, especially the ideal male figure, is also another important feature of Almodóvar's female films.
Most of the men in his films are missing, confused, depraved, and even transgender.
In this way, Almodóvar on the one hand disintegrated the traditional concept of gender; on the other hand, he also used the badness of men to reflect the beauty and perseverance of women.
Ana's father is a collection of the dark side of men.
He hated his wife Teresa, not only humiliated her as a slut, but also used Ana to torture her after the divorce.
When he learned that Ana had been raped, his first reaction was not to let the town scandal, but chose to cover up the truth, and after Ana became pregnant, he kicked his ex-wife back.
Janis' lover, Arturo, also has an extremely chaotic private life under the bright and shiny appearance.
His wife was ill and hospitalized, but he cheated on Janis for a year, and after Janis told him that she was pregnant, he revealed his cowardly and irresponsible true face.
Under such a premise, the "love" between Janis and Ana can also be understood-
They are so hurt by the male-dominated world that they are disillusioned with men.
But in daily life, they give each other women kindness, make them feel safe, happy, and eventually ferment into a love-like mutual bubble.
This plot seems strange, but it really explores the more subtle and complex dimension of women's emotions.
History
Another dark line in the film is janis's attempt to dig a mass grave in his home town.
This line seems abrupt, but it carries the national feelings that are rare in Almodóvar's films.
Why is this mass grave so important to Janis?
Time to go back to the 1930s —
In 1936, Franco launched the Spanish Civil War and imposed a dictatorship on Spain for more than 30 years.
During this period, the terrorist regime spread throughout the country, and about 150,000 dissidents and innocent civilians were secretly executed and their bodies were discarded in mass burial sites.
Among them were janis and the fathers of the townspeople.
In 2007, Spain passed the Historical Memory Act, which denied the legitimacy of franco's regime and demanded the restoration of the reputation of opposition figures and the removal or reformation of content that traced of Franco.
Later, the law was vetoed by Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy and withdrew funds for the project, blatantly covering up the historical truth.
This incident was the impetus for Almodóvar to create Parallel Mother.
In the film, through the role of Janis, he injects his own worries about historical memory -
Why can't history be forgotten? Why should we pursue the historical truth and remember the blood and tears of history?
First, Janis's identity as a cinematographer, and the ubiquitous film elements at the beginning and end of the film, point to the film's true intention beyond female expression: to record history and face the truth.
Secondly, the drama of "Parallel Mother" is "changing sons".
Janis' suspicion of the Cecilia gene echoes the Spanish people's vagueness of national blood and historical memory.
Janis's key shift is her decision to stop covering up the truth and return Cecilia to Ana.
This action of "handing over" pins almodóg's hope that the truth of Spanish history will no longer be silent, no longer tampered with and covered up.
In Almodóvar's view, the people of a country, especially the younger generation, can only heal their wounds if they face the truth of history. Only by confirming national identity and historical memory can we truly mature.
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Rotten Tomatoes 93%, his new Film of the Year must-see