Almodóvar Loses His Sense of Humor

What happened to make Pedro Almodóvar, one of international cinema’s most entertaining directors, get all sanctimonious?

His new film, Parallel Mothers, starts with the expected vibrant visual panache and mischievous melodramatic twists: Janis (Penélope Cruz), a celebrated photographer, approaches middle age desiring motherhood. An assignment to shoot a renowned archeologist, Arturo (Israel Elejalde), leads to a brief affair and pregnancy. Her sense of fulfillment is paralleled with Ana (Milena Smit), a distressed teenager she meets in the maternity ward.

That’s where Almodóvar’s roguishness kicks in, overlapping ideas about childbearing, female dependence, and social independence. Worldly Janis sports an “Everyone Should Be Feminist” T-shirt, advertising her enlightened generation while Ana is a hopeless Millennial, victim of toxic male aggression and a burden to her own mother, Teresa, an aspiring actress (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, in the film’s most compelling characterization).

These different attitudes make for farcical twists on “the women’s picture.” They provide Parallel Mothers with a fascinating survey of feminine experience — the compelling personal melodrama that Almodóvar uniquely understood (once again evoking the inspiration of Tennessee Williams). The personality contrasts between Janis and Ana should be enough to update the family dilemmas that Almodóvar bungled in Julieta, but instead of going psychological, Parallel Mothers uses female experience as a political pretext. It becomes the last thing anybody ever wanted from Almodóvar, a social-justice movie.

Janis tells Ana, “It’s time you knew what country you’re living in.” The affluent, middle-class adult instructs the selfish youth on Spain’s history during the Franco regime. Suddenly, Janis’s own personal privilege (her own feminist mother had named her as a misguided romantic homage to Janis Joplin) becomes condescending rather than individualistic. She acts the Karen to an annoying au pair girl — a high-handed attitude that Almodóvar fails to critique. Her historical consciousness is based on virtue-signaling — enlisting Arturo, who works for the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, to help uncover the graves of Spaniards who had been “disappeared” under Franco.

Libertine careerist Janis is self-aggrandizingly woke. Her disdain for the nuclear family is just like Black Lives Matter’s. She resembles those American progressives who want to try altering their national heritage to assuage some sense of guilt — or maybe to vent their unexamined grievance. (Turns out that the ARHM is a real-life organization just like the one in Don’t Look Up.) The commitment Cruz brings to this confused role comes from being Almodóvar’s muse, but she used to be funny at it — as when giving birth on a bus during the Franco-era scenes of Live Flesh. Now, Cruz’s seriousness narrows the emotional depth that once made Almodóvar’s art so wonderful.

Throughout his career, Almodóvar had mastered sexual emotions the same way that Hitchcock mastered suspense. The mystery and amusement in such films as Law of Desire, Matador, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Live Flesh, The Skin I Live In, Pain and Glory, and the best parts of High Heels, Talk to Her, and All About My Mother came from Almodóvar’s recognition of both male and female, heterosexual and homosexual yearning. They were comedies about liberation and forgiveness.

When Almodóvar began his career as an underground, radical satirist, he broke through the tissue of lies that had been the legacy of Spain’s repression. In a 2006 interview, Almodóvar recalled: “My revenge against Franco was to not even recognize his existence, his memory, to make my films as if he had never existed. Today I think it fitting that we don’t forget that period, and remember that it wasn’t so long ago.”

The result is that Parallel Mothers is Almodóvar’s most pompous and unconvincingly political film. Almodóvar presumes that Spain’s political attitudes never varied; that his ancestors all thought alike. Today’s ideological fascism is his new fashion. It uses the past as a distraction from what should be his satirical mission: confronting the hypocrisy, narcissism, and gender confusion of the present.