looking for parallels

I'm not really happy with the UK's "live and let die" with Covid policy pretending everything can go back to normal, so I still don't go out much, but a new Almodovar movie was a good enough excuse to break my own Covid rules in a half-empty cinema on a Monday lunchtime screening. As it happens, the last time I had been inside a cinema before this was the previous Almodovar film, Pain and Glory, in August 2019.

So there are two films to discuss here, really, the double motherhood story at the core of the film (which would have made a perfectly reasonable full length film on its own), and the digging up the bodies of the civil war story wrapped around it and only flimsily attached to it. I'm thinking anybody watching it to learn about the missing casualties of the civil war will be disappointed. That topic would deserve a film (or many) on its own, and if Almodovar doesn't want to do that film that's fine by me. Other directors like Alex de la Iglesia have covered the madness and cruelty of that war and the trauma caused by it very convincingly.

At first, the title of the film and the maternal theme of the main story put me off a bit, as both Penelope Cruz and I are a bit too old for these things, but it did win me over with the generational contrast between the two women, and with the classic Almodovar combo of Penelope plus primary colours. Never fails. As usual, we get slogans to link us to the present day (ok, recent past) feminism, in this case it's Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's title "We should all be feminists" appearing on Penelope's t-shirt. Not sure when this was filmed (allegedly Almodovar had a script and a poster design ready ten years ago), but we're firmly in the pre-Covid era of the late 2010s, with SUVs and iphones all over the place.

So much for my random thoughts after first viewing - for a professional review, try Peter Bradshaw's in the Guardian.