Venice Film Festival 2021: Start with Almodóvar: Shadows of the Past

Architecturally different worlds collide here. On the way to the festival site on the Lido, magnificent buildings tell of the early days of beach holidays, behind them the turrets of the Hotel Excelsior soar into the sky, the palace itself is a remnant of fascism, and right at the front shines the latest among the biennial cinemas, the Sala Giardino, bright red and cheeky in the sun. Is it possible to reconcile opposites, different epochs, simply juxtapose them? In the new film by Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, with which the 78th Venice Film Festival opened, things look a little different – only what has been dragged to light, named and processed can heal. The story, that is a central sentence in “Parallel Mothers”, refuses to shut up.

“Parallel Mothers” is a worthy prelude to the festival. Almodóvar has found himself getting older for a few films, but apparently he can take on more and more of it – his last aging hero still suffered from back pain, but in this film life only really begins with maturity. The two mothers who meet in a hospital room are both single, but they belong to different generations: the photographer Janis (Penélope Cruz) believes that this pregnancy is her last chance to have a child; Ana (Milena Smit) is not even of legal age. Janis is determined to have the exhumation of a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War in which lies her great-grandfather, who was murdered by the Franquists.

Almodóvar, now 71 years old, has become famous as a kind of ambassador for the new Spain, and colorful urban families are often formed in his films. But he’s also a child of the old Franco days. His characters’ thirst for freedom always had something to do with it, even when he conquered European cinema with “Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown” at the end of the 1980s. But he never said as clearly as in “Parallel Mothers” that his characters don’t just live liberally, but that behind the sometimes brightly colored facades there is a political stance: In “Parallel Mütter” two levels have to be tidied up – Janis demands a sense of history , a demarcation from Franquism. But neither can she find personal happiness if she has forced it at someone else’s expense.

Janis soon realizes that her baby might not be her own. Can she just keep it quiet? All you have to do is shut up. But there is an injustice in it that she cannot stand. Almodóvar combines the search for the mass grave and unexplained motherhood in a single image when Janis opens the message of a laboratory test on her computer with trembling fingers – you can see a hilly landscape there, and the folders on the screen look like the markings on the Image of a burial ground.

The characters are familiar from the Almodovarian universe, if only because there are actresses who, so to speak, belong there – besides Penélope Cruz also Rossy de Palma as Elena, Janis’ best friend and best client. But the story may develop a little differently than one is used to from Almodóvar. Not a thriller in the Hitchcock sense, at the end of which there is a happily thrown together extended family – a real family drama, at the end of which everyone is heirs to their own family history. Almodóvar, who once stood for the zeitgeist like no other filmmaker, is now developing against the current. Everything becomes shrill and simpler, but he tells more slowly and more quietly and more deliberately, stories at the end of which there can never be a simple solution. And that’s good.

Almodóvar clashed with the zeitgeist even before the premiere of “Parallel Mothers”. One of his peculiarities is that his stories and his pictures revolve around women – the way he managed to film Cruz’s cleavage from above without any indecency in “Volver” is legendary. If the poster for “Parallel Mothers” shows a nipple with a drop of milk on it, it would be pretty stupid to find that offensive, even if Almodóvar’s personal mother cult is sometimes a bit too much.

There is friction between times and generations

The algorithm that is in power on Instagram doesn’t make such subtle differences and has removed a post with the poster. Which then promptly led to protests. Instagram has apologized to Almodóvar, and he has commented on his brother Agustín’s Twitter account that although he has always relied on the friendliness of strangers, he has relied on people and not on algorithms. “No matter how much information an algorithm has, it will never have a heart or common sense.” If someone had seen the film on Instagram – finding the wrong thing is not a label, it is a well-founded attitude.

There is actually a friction between times and generations in “Parallel Mothers”. On Janis’ wall there is a picture of her on her mother’s arm, it looks like a hippie colony. That was in Ibiza, she says, her mother named her after Janis Joplin. Ana doesn’t know who that was, Janis graciously ignores that. But not about Ana’s parroted wisdom not to touch the crimes of the Franquists. Do you actually know, Janis roars at Ana, in which country you live? The answer will be that she has no idea. But at least you can explain it to her.