◎ Mei Sheng
Spanish director Almodóvar's new film "Parallel Mother" launched this year has a certain bizarre color compared to many of his previous old works. Penelope Cruz and Milena Smit, played by Janice and Anna, respectively, mistakenly took each other's daughters as their own flesh and bones in the hospital delivery room. A few years later, the fates of the two single mothers intersected, and the emotional direction deviated from the original track.
In the process of advancing the plot, the invisibility or disappearance of men, the love and hate between mother and daughter, the abrupt end of life and other brushstrokes will make audiences familiar with Almodóvar feel familiar with déjà vu, reminiscent of films such as "The Woman on the Verge of Collapse", "Everything About My Mother", "Love High Heels", "Return" and so on. Almodóvar, whose films have been made for more than forty years, has always favored creative elements that are distinct and unified.
However, the difference between the new film and the old work is also obvious. The two heroines are markedly less intensely entangled than the idiots and women of his previous works, while fleeing the private realm and drawing up a heavy history of the country that the Spanish government and the populace deliberately removed from their memory banks.
Before franco became head of state of Spain in 1939, he initiated a civil war and persecution campaign that cost more than 100,000 Spaniards their lives. The bodies of the deceased were discarded haphazardly, forming multiple mass graveyards. For nearly 40 years, his dictatorship wiped out this history. After the fall of franco in 1975, Spain entered a democratic society, but his ghost was still gone, and his crimes were never liquidated. In 2007, the Law of Historical Memory, which denied the legitimacy of franco's regime, was published in Spain, but it soon became a dead letter. The line "Historical Memory Law, Zero Euros" in "Parallel Mothers" says that it is worthless in Spain.
In recent years, two different voices have emerged in Spain about whether the state should come forward to organize the exhumation of the remains of the victims: the relatives of the victims naturally hope that the souls of their relatives can be comforted, but the right-wing conservative forces are strongly opposed, believing that the country should focus on future development and cannot constantly expose old scars.
Janice and Anna are representatives of these two voices. Janice was born and raised in her hometown, where there were many historical victims, including her great-grandfather, and she was obsessed with asking for an explanation for them. Anna's father, a standard right-winger, was influenced by his father to form a sense of history that would not benefit the present.
Differences of position are also determined by their age and identity. Yanis is a well-known photographer in recent middle age, and her ability and experience allow her to use her camera to take pictures of fashion landscapes and current figures, and she can also gaze at the abyss of history with her eyes. Anna is relatively young, needs to rely on divorced parents to live, but the relationship with them is tense, the outlook on life and values have not yet been formed, swayed by her parents and social rules - she was raped and pregnant by several boys and then driven out of the house by her shameful father, wanted to call the police and feared being besieged by the media, etc., indicating that the social atmosphere in Spain is becoming increasingly conservative, and franco's ghost seems to be hiding in the shadows and snickering.
However, compared with the arrogant and arrogant conservative forces at the practical level, Anna's fear of hands and feet is not only pediatric, but also has an element of coercion. This is Almodóvar's deliberate setting: he can't change the course of the times, but he can make conservatives look like little sheep or paper tigers in the movie.
The independent and capable Janice also pinned on Almodóvar's ideal of "changing reality".
Many of the women in Almodóvar's past works, such as the actor Pepa in "The Woman on the Verge of Collapse" and the writer Leo in "My Secret Flower", are essentially the heroines of the French master Jean Cocto's 1930 premiere of the play "The Voice of Man", eager to use an intermittent telephone line to save the hearts of men who are determined to break up with them. Despite their successful careers, the focus of their lives is their husbands or lovers. Their hot and cold attitudes make their moods oscillate back and forth between hysteria and joy – in 2020, the play that appeared many times in his films was made into a short film of the same name by him, but the phone in the woman's hand was replaced by an old landline to a new iPhone.
The expectation and despair of women in "The Voice of Mankind" are also, to some extent, the state and mentality of ordinary individuals facing the world every day. According to li yumin, the translator of the Chinese edition of "Selected Plays of Cocteau": a woman's dialogue with a telephone is the "human voice", the "life" of Baiwei. Most of the characters in Almodóvar's lens, although their gender and emotional orientation are various, always have the shadow of a woman who uses the telephone line as a life-saving straw.
Janice in "Parallel Mother" doesn't need a phone line at all. At the beginning, Almodóvar tells the audience that she is a game-bearer. In the studio, when she took a picture of forensic anthropologist Arturo with a camera, she confidently and politely instructed him to pose and make movements. After conceiving Arturo's child, she simply told the other party that he would not bear any responsibility and that she would give birth to the child and raise it alone. Even, in order not to let Arturo find herself, she changed her mobile phone number.
In the case of the government almost ignoring the question, Yanis quietly sorted out the files of the great-grandfather and other victims, hoping that the truth would be revealed in the future, but also because she was strong enough in her heart and had the courage and courage to face history. But that doesn't mean she doesn't need men. She can raise her own children, but conception requires male cooperation. The bones of great-grandfathers and others can be smoothly excavated and sorted out, and it is inseparable from Arturo's selfless help.
When Janice walked to their cemetery with the villagers (mostly women), holding the remains of her ancestors or husbands, the history of silence for many years finally spoke. "History never goes silent. No matter how much they denigrate, tamper with, and falsify, human history refuses to remain silent. Used for the end credits, this sentence from the Latin American writer Eduardo Galeiano speaks to the mission of history and the meaning of the past to the present. From the perspective of development, human beings need to learn to let go of the unbearable and traumatic pain of history, but the premise of forgiveness must be to face the truth and retain memories, rather than completely erase disasters from the mind.
"Facing history" is easier said than done. On the one hand, human beings are good at forgetting, and tragedies always start in a cycle. On the other hand, our constitution of good and evil will make individuals inadvertently become perpetrators. Janice had long known that she and Anna had held the wrong child, and had thought about letting Anna know everything, after all, the two had lived under the same roof for a long time, and the relationship was not just ordinary friends. However, considering the fact that her own daughter died unexpectedly, she chose to hide the truth and cause great harm to Anna.
This makes Janice a contradiction. While tracing the grand historical truth, she also creates puzzles in the private sphere. Fortunately, she finally confessed everything to Anna, and was forgiven by Anna, and the two decided to continue to raise Anna's biological daughter, their common daughter, together. This kind of family structure and kinship that breaks through the traditional model also echoes the endings of films such as "Tie Me Up and Tie Me Up" and "Everything About My Mother".
The mystery of both the historical and private levels is revealed at the same time, and the collective national memory has the possibility of penetrating into the individual space. When Janice and Anna and others remembered the ghosts of the dead more than 80 years ago, their daughters were also present. The fact that the descendants are girls rather than boys heralds this memory that should not be forgotten will also be passed on to future generations and remembered by them.
Although Almodóvar had previously ridiculed the Franco regime in works such as "Living Colors" and "Pain and Glory", it was basically the first time that he had seriously explored public social issues related to history. He himself talked about the original intention of filming "Parallel Mother", which is to remind the audience, especially young people, not to forget history.
Considering that Almodóvar is 72 years old, as one of his die-hard fans, I have admiration for his change in the direction of his creation, and I hope that his hopes will not be disappointed.