“Madres paralelas”: Pedro Almodovar, to life and death – Le Monde

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In Broken embraces (2009), we could catch a glimpse of the script of a feature film titled Madres paralelas. Later, it is a poster of the same film that we see enthroned at the entrance to the office of the hero, a famous screenwriter. “Madres paralelas”, where the name of a phantom film, which one believed to be invented for the needs of the fiction and which, today, leaves on the screens. We know Almodovar adept at the small autobiographical stones scattered throughout the work, and these occurrences of a future project, appearing in the middle ofBroken embraces, perhaps had the value of an intimate reminder: that one day, he, the greatest living Spanish filmmaker, set about making this scenario and finally evokes the Francoist past of his country.

There is something very moving about seeing a 72-year-old filmmaker patiently waiting for the right moment to confront what he had never filmed before. No doubt he was in a hurry by the passionate debates on the memory of the civil war, which divide the Spaniards into two camps : those who do not consider it necessary to reopen the wounds, and the others, supporters of a work of memory where everything remains to be done, and first of all to exhume the bodies of the victims buried in Franco’s mass graves scattered throughout the country.

It is this work of memory that obsesses Janis (Penélope Cruz), photographer who, at the beginning of the film, portrays Arturo Buendia, an anthropologist member of a foundation who participates in the excavation of a mass grave – the one where Janis’s great-grandfather is. But, while waiting for such a construction site to finally take place, a woman lives her life.

The elasticity of melodrama

Under the memorial scenario, Almodovar puts this inexhaustible motif back on the job: the portrait of a woman. Janis finds herself pregnant with Arturo who, married, cannot assume the child. Determined to keep the baby, the photographer frees her lover from any obligation. In the maternity ward, she shares her room with Ana (Milena Smit), 17, pregnant after a rape. Their bond is sealed around their common destiny: single mothers, both give birth to little girls who must be placed under observation. When they leave the maternity ward, their baby under their arms, the two women exchange their numbers – and think of leaving it there.

There is, in the sequel to Madres paralelas, narrating the tormented and amorous reunion of Janis and Ana, the feeling of an absolutely free gesture, which gives the impression that the scenario is only there as a framework to welcome the freedom of the characters. There would only be to watch them move, love, act and make mistakes. It’s as if, over time and age, Almodovar seemed less to produce formal melodramas than to experience the elasticity of a beloved genre.

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