by Ryan Smillie, Staff Writer

Parallel Mothers
Written and Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
Starring Penélope Cruz, Rossy de Palma and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón
Runtime: 120 minutes

Pedro Almodóvar burst onto the scene with his controversial 1980 debut Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom. Not so much a critique of the then-recently deceased Franco and his repressive regime but a total repudiation thereof, the film scandalized critics with its open, bizarre sexuality and vulgar, kitschy humor. Naturally, Pepi, Luci, Bom found a cult audience; its vivid colors and melodramatic plot resonated with a newly liberated generation. 

As Almodóvar’s career continued, his stylistic hallmarks remained ever-present, refined and stretched across dozens of outlandish plots and numerous genres, and critical acclaim caught up with the cult following. His films grew up along with him, culminating in 2018’s Pain and Glory, a self-reflective look at an aging director coming to terms with both his past and his future. Though Parallel Mothers, his newest film, is not quite as attached to the details of Almodóvar’s own life, instead, it feels like a mediation on his filmography.

Janis and Ana (Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit), the titular mothers, meet sharing a brightly painted room in a Madrid maternity ward. About to give birth and without their babies’ fathers in the picture, that’s just about where Janis and Ana’s similarities seem to end in their parallel hospital beds. Janis is a successful photographer in her late 30s, worried that an accidental pregnancy with her married lover (Israel Elejalde) might be her one chance to become a mother. Ana, on the other hand, is the teenage daughter of an aspiring actress (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), not even sure that she wants to be a mother. Janis and Ana befriend each other and exchange numbers, but neither is prepared for the way their lives have already become inextricably bound.

Cruz is no stranger to Almodóvarian motherhood; in fact, her first of seven collaborations with the director (1997’s Live Flesh) found her giving birth on a bus, mere months after her Parallel Mothers co-star Smit was born. After much lauded (deservedly so!) turns as a pregnant nun and a headstrong young mother, Cruz ventures into new territory with Almodóvar, a new mother with years of experience behind her. Now in her late 40s (but easily playing Janis as a decade younger), Cruz shades Janis’s occasional selfishness and impulsivity with a layer of maturity and rationality, a desire to undo her questionable decisions before it’s too late. Without any histrionics, Janis’s anguish is palpable and affecting. And just as Cruz was supported by Almodóvar stalwarts Carmen Maura and Chus Lampreave in Volver, now Cruz ushers Smit, obviously a star in the making, and Sánchez-Gijón into the Almodóvar Cinematic Universe. Fingers crossed that this also includes Veneno’s own Daniela Santiago, who makes a brief cameo as one of Janis’s models.

This isn’t to say that Parallel Mothers is just a rehash of previous collaborations between Almodóvar and Cruz. While motherhood has always been a key subject for Almodóvar, from repressed housewives to grieving mothers and ghostly grandmothers, Parallel Mothers never feels stale in its tale of intersecting maternity. And the subplot that ignites the film itself, Janis’s efforts to have her grandfather exhumed from his unmarked grave, marks Almodóvar’s first direct reference to the horrors of the Franco regime. Forty years after Almodóvar’s first feature, Franco’s absence is no longer the unspoken context, but another legacy to come to terms with, along with Almodóvar’s own life and career.

El Gran Movimiento
Written and Directed by Kiro Russo
Starring Francisa Arce de Aro, Israel Hurtado, and Gustavo Milán Ticona
Runtime: 85 minutes

La Paz, Bolivia is the highest major city in the world, and Kiro Russo’s El Gran Movimiento starts off even higher than that, zooming into the city from above. At a distance, the city seems calm, just a skyline surrounded by towering mountains. But as the camera burrows into the city, we can see striking miners, bustling shopkeepers, signs of life through day and night. Russo buzzes through the city as Elder (Julio César Ticona), a young miner, faces a mysterious illness while looking for work in the city. Fittingly for a story told at such a high attitude, El Gran Movimiento is dizzying, with a rhythm all its own, ready to reward anyone on its wavelength.

El Gran Movimiento is a study in contrasts – inside vs. outside, light vs. dark, modernity vs. tradition. Russo’s poetic approach glides through these themes with suggestive shots that would make Sergei Eisenstein proud. The bright lights of an outdoor TV transition to the strobing lights of a dance floor. The image of Elder’s tests at a medical clinic are echoed as a disheveled tramp (Max Bautista Uchasara) applies a poultice later. Even the beginning zoom into the city is repeated in reverse towards the end as the tramp leaves the city, becoming smaller and smaller until the rock formations outside the city are all that can be seen.  

This is a film that is more evocative than dramatic, and it succeeds in mesmerizing. While there is certainly an economic critique embedded – there’s a miners’ strike throughout, and a closing montage of capitalist meat-grinding (both metaphorical and literal) feels more mechanical than the preceding near-mystical tour through La Paz – even that message feels like part of the film’s subconscious. While you might link this strike to Bolivia’s recent US-backed coup and subsequent restoration of President Evo Morales to power, the film doesn’t make that link explicit, just leaves open the possibility. Just like a moment late in the film when groups of laborers across the city burst into a dance evoking Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” it doesn’t need to be explained; it just feels right.

Just a Movement
Written and Directed by Vincent Meessen
Starring Bouba Diallo, Marie-Thérèse Diedhiou and Cheikh Hamalah Blondin Diop
Runtime: 110 minutes

Art didn’t just imitate life in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967); it invited in life in the form of the Niger-born Marxist intellectual and activist Omar Blondin Diop. Diop makes a cameo appearance as Omar, giving a lecture on socialism to the Maoist French students around whom the film is centered. His scene is brief but memorable, with Omar questioning the students’ conception of socialist revolution, asking, “Where do just ideas arise? Where do just ideas come from?”

With Just a Movement, director Vincent Meessen investigates Diop’s life and legacy. Deported from France in 1969 and dead in a Senegalese prison four years later (at only 26 years old), Diop’s life was brief but impactful, his image living on for decades in Godard’s film and his story inspiring generations of Senegalese thinkers. Through his documentary work, Meessen not only reconstructs Diop’s life (through clips of La Chinoise set against side-profile interviews with people connected to Diop), but also presents a look at modern-day Senegal, awash with political potential, but facing colonialism in a new form. Though the politics of Just a Movement and La Chinoise are similar, Godard’s satire always feels arch, both commending and teasing its student revolutionaries. Meessen’s film, on the other hand, emphasizes the tragedy of Diop’s life. Unlike the fictional characters, his real life was upended and cut short by his very real commitment to his political beliefs.

Though informative, the film has a scattered quality – Godard-inspired, I’d assume – that makes it feel more suited for viewing as part of a museum exhibit rather than as an independent documentary. Nearly fifty years after his death, Diop’s philosophy still resonates, and Meessen does a great service by broadcasting it and allowing Diop’s contemporaries and inheritors to apply Diop’s beliefs to the 21st century. In fact, the most powerful scene in the film is a recreation of a conversation on a train in La Chinoise. Here, the discussion is centered around the modern-day reverberations of the politics that Diop fought for – the role of dissent and mobilization, the conditions of the Arab Spring, the difficulty of transparency. It’s where I found the film to be at its most interesting, remaking one of Godard’s scenes for Diop and for the present, thereby tying together the various strands of the film. I could’ve stayed on that train for the entire length of the film.