As the critic Marcela Valdés notes, “Nunca castiga a sus protagonistas femeninas por pecar, sino que celebra su resistencia ”. Almodóvar treats both with his customary empathy. Her friend Ana’s mother places her career before the needs of her daughter and duly struggles with a sense of guilt. Typically for Almodóvar’s female protagonists, Janis combines both strength and fragility. Not that Almodóvar idealises women characters: as in Todo sobre mi madre, relationships between women present challenges that they must dig deep to overcome. The males responsible for the ‘parallel mother’ pregnancies are too problematic to enter this universo femenino. It is therefore unsurprising that the Madres paralelas maternity unit is a man-free zone, where women help each other through the ordeal of labour. If you enjoy the director’s trademark portrayal of unconventional family structures, you will not be disappointed by Madres paralelas. This theme of strong single-motherhood harks back to Almodóvar’s breakout film Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, and was further developed in Todo sobre mi madre and Volver. Ella sola conforma una unidad familiar, ni siquiera necesita a un hombre a su lado ”. For him, the protagonist Janis (Penélope Cruz) is “la madre absoluta. “Esta es una película que habla de maternidades distintas ”, Almodóvar told an interviewer. Most of Madres paralelas plays out as an engaño-induced maternal melodrama. Engaño resurfaces in Madres paralelas, in which the two characters most committed to revealing the truth about Spain’s past prove to be less than truthful in their own personal lives. In addition to its dramatic potential, Almodóvar has shown how deceit can be a force for good as well as ill: for example, Raimunda concealing Paco’s death in Volver in order to protect her daughter. The spark that ignited the production came when Almodóvar found a way to intertwine two narratives about truth and secrecy, one at a personal level and the other centred on Spain’s historical memory.Īlmodóvar devotees are long familiar with the importance of deception – engaño – in his story-telling. Madres paralelas, which opened in the UK in late January 2022, reveals that Almodóvar and the dictator have unfinished business. Its critique of the compromises of the Transition, such as the pacto del olvido, seemed to settle Almodóvar’s score with el franquismo. The 2018 documentary El silencio de otros, which he co-produced, seemed to fulfil that ambition, with its intimate stories of those abused or bereaved by Franco’s regime and their quest for restorative justice in the modern era. Almodóvar had in fact long pondered making a film that would address Spain’s ‘historical memory’ (ie the tragic legacy of the Franco era, involving torture, murder and disappearances on a massive scale).
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