In 1977, two years after the death of General Francisco Franco, the Spanish parliament enacted an amnesty law that appeared to satisfy the demands of pro-democracy groups. After all, in marches across Spain, one of the main slogans shouted by the demonstrators was "Amnesty and freedom!" ”（¡Amnestía y Libertad!）。 Amnesty is about freedom; it means that political prisoners are released and opponents of the old regime can end their exiles.
It's an exciting time in Spain. I remember that Saturday night in April 1977, I was in a taxi in Barcelona, and the driver gave a loud cheer and began to honk his horn excitedly. It felt as if his favorite team had won the league title. But I soon discovered that the reason he was excited was because of the news that the Communist Party had been legitimized in Spain and that its candidates were going to run in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
The year before, the government had reluctantly allowed Catalans to celebrate their national holiday. In 1977, an estimated one million people took part in a march demanding increased autonomy in Catalonia, some even advocating for Catalan independence. At this time, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, led by Felipe González, became the main opposition party and would come to power in 1982.
No one wants to talk about the past, which is understandable. After all, the moment is full of possibilities. Politics, in a way, allows people to ignore politics. I vividly remember a crazy party in Barcelona on the night of Franco's death, when no one even mentioned the dead dictator. There are so many other things to talk about, and even the mention of him and his accomplices in passing seems to violate an important norm.
The Spaniards, who were teenagers and twenties at the time, seemed to have already left Franco behind. They have figured out a way to grow under an oppressive regime without paying much attention to it. The previous generation to which their parents belonged also came up with a way to survive. One of the most important tools is silence.
Time and time again, people insist that even if their parents or grandparents were involved in civil war, they would not mention a single word at home, as if this silence were a proof of alibi.
The 1977 amnesty law was approved by an overwhelming majority of left- and right-wing parties, and the amnesty also covers crimes committed by the Franco regime while in power. At the time, no one saw the dangers of doing so. In any case, no one wanted to put the elderly generals on trial endlessly at that time. This will drain the energy needed to rebuild civil society in Spain.
A new generation is on the rise, and they have no interest in what happened before they became adults. Once, when a young Spanish poet found out that I had written a sad novel about the Spanish Civil War, he shook his head in pity and said, "No one is interested in the sad ending of the Civil War anymore." ”
Soon after the advent of democracy, Pedro Almodóvar became the high priestess of New Spain's brash drama, high color, and super-thrill. The characters he created recreated himself and the world that belonged to them at the time. They value the sexual revolution as much as others do to political change. In his first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980), one character noticed a "wave of eroticism sweeping the country," as if to make a declaration of independence, when there was even a contest called "All The Erections." When Pepi (Carmen Maura) is raped by a policeman, her and her friends plan revenge by discovering the policeman's wife's strange, secret sexual desires, thus ruining his marriage. Instead of going to the authorities to report the case or taking to the streets to protest, they took it as a fierce personal act. When the film was first screened, these images of the policeman's wife and the kind of sexual stimulation she really wanted caused a lot of laughter in the audience, and at the same time they were profoundly subversive.
Motherhood is one of the great themes in Almodóvar's films. In Why Should I Be So Destined? In What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984), Gloria (Carmen Maura) has to put up with her mother-in-law, while in Matador (1986), Angel (Antonio Banderas) has to confront his devout religious mother; in Matador (1986), Angel (Antonio Banderas) has to confront his devout religious mother. In High Heels (1991), Rebeca (Victoria Abril) lives in the shadow of her mother (Marisa Paredes), a famous singer who marries her mother's former lover. In these films, the mother is not a haunting presence or a past that must be faced, but a nasty person who needs to be pushed away. However, in later films, such as All About My Mother (1999), Almodóvar dramatized motherhood in a more complex way.
His characters have a habit of turning a blind eye to problems that may seem too obvious in themselves. For example, in Law of Desire (1987), two characters in a love triangle are gay, and they don't experience any guilt or repressed emotions that might be easily imagined by the viewer. They have other ideas in their minds, like the other victims in his work. To do something more interesting, they eschewed their own definition of victim status.
In The Return (Volver, 2006), Almodóvar allows past generations, including a dead mother, to haunt those who are still alive. Pain and Glory (2019) is an elegy and a self-torture. One of the roles is Banderas' version of the director himself, lonely, melancholy, and restless. Almodóvar has spent most of his career subverting the concept of "home," but in the two films mentioned above, he seems ready to deal with the possibility that he and those around him actually have a past, a place where they were supposed to start, and that's not just the result of their dreams.
In 2019, Almodóvar was one of the producers of The Silence of Others, a documentary about the impact of the 1977 amnesty law. Written and directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, the film focuses on the silence and secrecy imposed on Spain after the Civil War.
To this day, there are unnamed mass graves of victims executed by Franco's forces during the civil war throughout the country. In 2007, after the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party came to power, the Historical Memory Law was enacted, the purpose of which was to "recognize and expand the rights of those who were persecuted or violent for political, ideological or religious reasons during civil war and dictatorship, [and] to promote moral reparations and the restoration of personal and family memories." ”
Subsequently, the Socialist Party began to fund the search for mass graves and supported the excavation and rebury of the dead. But the measure was terminated by the right-wing government led by Mariano Rajoy, which ruled from 2011 to 2018. Until last year, the Socialist government, which returned to power in 2018, announced that it would reinstate funding for exhumations.
In The Silence of Others, we see an old woman undergoing an oral swab, whose father may have been buried in a mass grave, and now needs to be collected from her DNA to check and confirm her father's body. We have seen the king and two right-wing prime ministers, including Rajoy, condemn the idea of rediscovering the past. We will also see another old woman, María Martín, pointing to a road that was built on top of a mass grave where her mother, who was illegally executed in the Civil War, was buried.
Almodóvar's latest film, Parallel Mothers (2021), begins with a Fashion Photographer Janis (Penélope Cruz) living in Madrid, who consults with forensic archaeologist Arturo (Israel Elejalde) about the possibility of obtaining private funding to dig the mass grave where her great-grandfather was buried. Soon, in the midst of her relationship with Arturo, she becomes pregnant and shares a delivery room with an equally soon-to-be-born teenage girl, Anna (Milena Smit).
The new film begins with a story about a mother. Anna's mother (played by Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) is an actress who is too busy to take care of her. Janice's mother, a hippie, died of a drug overdose. They are all women without mothers who are uneasily trying to be mothers. But it's also a film about identity and belonging. When Janice begins to suspect that the child she brought home from the hospital may not be her child, she wipes the mouths of herself, the child, and Anna, just as the remarried old woman looking for her father in "The Silence of Others" does.
Before pushing Janice and the film itself into new territory, Almodóvar created her and the world in which she lived with the kind of talent and enthusiasm we hear through his films. Her apartment is like a character in a movie, with its ornaments, red furniture and dazzling novelty.
With the style of her dress and apartment, as well as her friendship with Elena of the fashion world (played by Rossy de Palma) and the content of her work, Janice has all the characteristics of an Almodóvar classic heroine. However, as the plot progresses we come to know that she does not gain strength from any process of self-innovation. She is as fragile as Salvador in Pain and Glory. She had never seen her own father, nor had a picture of him. She has no siblings. It turns out that Elena was not her friend in the Madrid social scene, but a good childhood companion from the same village. For a moment, when Janice found out that she wasn't the real mother of the child she had brought home, she stood in the shadows, and that seemed right. Much of her existence is elusive.
When Janice realized that she had held the wrong child, her silence was almost understandable at first, but when we looked at it from Anna's point of view, the behavior seemed a little unethical. In a very subtle and organic way, this act echoes what happened to the victims of the Civil War in New Spain. Like Almodóvar trying to show on the most personal level, how easy and tempting it is to hide the truth.
"Parallel Mothers" is set in 2016. When Janice asked Arturo for help in finding the grave, he replied that the government had eliminated all subsidies for the discovery and exhumation of the bodies of those killed in the Civil War. "Prime Minister Rajoy," he added, "boasted in an interview that in the national budget, the euro spending used for historical memory is zero." Followers of Almodóvar's films will notice something new: he mentions the name of a prime minister.
So far, however, he has not been entirely politically exclusive. For him, normalizing the strangeness of sex is a profound political act. Too often, Almodóvar proves himself in his eccentric way that he has always been a moralist against dishonesty and hypocrisy; his character strives to recognize the other side of himself that is hidden or forbidden to be discovered.
Although Almodóvar was fascinated by the present, in his previous films The Return and Pain and Glory, Almodóvar dramatized the ritual of death. The Return opens with a scene from a cemetery where local women are cleaning up their headstones; it also includes an old aunt's vigil and funeral. In Pain and Glory, there are some heartwarming scenes between mother and son, when all political satire is cast aside. In one of the scenes, the mother (Julieta Serrano) tells her son very seriously what funeral she was looking forward to: how she wanted to be buried; what headdress she was wearing; and she also wanted her to go barefoot into the grave because it meant there was no bondage.
The stark image of Janice's persistence emerges from a state of ambiguity in the argument with Anna, who doesn't understand why she cares so much about the vanished tomb. In her anger and her fierce reaction, Janice became the daughter of Thebeid oedipus and queen Iocaste in Almodóvar's version of Antigone[1] Greek mythology. The tragic writers Sophocles and Euripides both wrote plays featuring Antigone. ）。 She believes that burying the dead is a sacred duty.
Of the older generation in the Janice family, all the men are dead; only one woman is alive, and she is Aunt Brigida (Julieta Serrano). When they returned to the village to witness the excavations, we saw the elderly Aunt Brigida present at the scene surrounded by her family. At one wonderful moment, one of her granddaughters said that Brigitta was only four months old when her father, Janice's great-grandfather, was executed, and she remembered him. Brigida immediately corrected her. She said she only remembered what her mother had told her and that she had no interest in mythologizing the past. Like the mother in Pain and Glory, she knows exactly how she wants to be buried. She wanted to be buried with her family, for which she needed to find and exhum her father's body.
Apparently, Brigida also needs to undergo oral sampling. In the mass grave scene, workers sift through clay to find small objects such as teeth or buttons, reminiscent of a similar scene in The Silence of Others. In a truly dramatic moment, the villagers walk hand in hand towards the mass grave, where the excavated skeletons have been numbered separately.
At the front of the line was besides Janice and Anna, and Elena. She held a picture of a relative buried there. Almodóvar, who used rossy de Palma as the most gorgeous character in his films, now has her playing a woman from a small village and seeking justice for the dead, which gives us an idea of his intentions and efforts to do so.
In Pain and Glory and Parallel Mother, Almodóvar's protagonist lives alone. They are more wary of the forces of the past than they are in the present. In the previous film, Banderas played Salvador as an increasingly tired and sad character whose desire for life had waned. Penelope Cruz, on the other hand, made her stronger, and she didn't fall into grief. At the end of the film, when the grave is opened, we learn that she is pregnant again. What is perhaps Almodóvar's most political film gently pushes the characters back into their private lives, as if their shattered world had regained some form of harmony and found some sort of solution.
| originally published in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 69, No. 4, March 10, 2022 pp.11-13
References
| ↑1 | Daughter of Oedipus, king of Thebes, and queen Aeocaste in Greek mythology. The tragic writers Sophocles and Euripides both wrote plays featuring Antigone. |
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Renowned Irish novelist and literary critic, contributing editor of the London Review of Books, Irene and Sidney Lee of Columbia University, USA Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.
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