The 78th Venice Film Festival, which runs from September 1 to 11, will open with Spanish master Pedro Almodovar’s ‘Madres Paralelas’ or ‘Parallel Mothers’. It will have two stars playing – Penelope Cruz, who may well be described as the auteur’s muse, and Tom Grater. The movie will be part of the main competition and also include actors such as Milena Smit, Israel Elejalde, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Julieta Serrano and Rossy De Palma. This will be the second time in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that Venice will have it’s in-person edition.
Parallel Mothers’ plot focuses on Janis and Ana, who meet in a hospital room where they are going to give birth. Both are single and got pregnant by accident. While middle-aged Janis is ecstatic about the baby that is going to arrive soon, teenage Ana is scared, and repents that she ever got herself into this situation. In fact, she is traumatised by what had happened to her.
Janis tries her best to comfort Ana, and while they walk through the hospital corridors at night, they talk and forge a close bond that will complicate their lives. Both women will change.
For Almodovar, this film and its selection are of enormous importance. “I was born as a movie director in 1983 at Venice,” he said. “In the Mezzogiorno Mezzanotte section. Thirty-eight years later, I am called to open the Festival. I cannot explain the joy and the honour, and how much these mean to me without falling into complacency.”
Almodovar is renowned for the way he creates his women characters and celebrates them. I still remember a graphically moving opening scene in the 2006 Cannes premiere, Volver, in which tens of widows are scrubbing and polishing their husbands graves on a wind-swept day, the fallen leaves strewn all over. There is another scene where Raimunda, essayed by Cruz, shoves a dead body inside her huge refrigerator – which was brazenly copied in a Tamil film!
The director shot to international fame with his 1988 ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”, which was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. Success then followed him like a shadow, and movies like ‘Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down’ (1990),’ High Heels’ (1991), and ‘Live Flesh’ (1997) took him to starry heights. Later, his ‘All About My Mother’ (1999) and ‘Talk to Her’ (2002) earned him Academy Awards. His romantic work, ‘Broken Embraces’ (2009) and the psychological thriller ‘The Skin I Live In’ (2011) were critically lauded. The 2019 ‘Julieta’ and the 2019 ‘Pain and Glory’ competed at Cannes for the Palm dÓr.
Actress Adriana Ugarte, who stars in ‘Julieta’ (loosely based on the short stories of Alice Munro), grew up in Spain dreaming of acting in an Almodovar work. She got her chance in ‘Julieta’. “When it comes to Mr. Almodóvar and his female characters”, Ugarte said once, “It’s a mystery, but he can feel how we feel and how we are.”
For the four decades, the helmer has been at the helm of films, he has drawn inspiration from diverse directors like — Alfred Hitchcock and Pina Bausch, to name just two. But Almodovar’s fascination for women characters and his ability to write them with passion and tenderness has remained constantly with him, and the actresses have loved him to bits. There was an occasion at Cannes when Cruz shouted “Pedro I love You” and blew him a kiss. He was seated in the auditorium, and she was on the stage.
“I was lucky to meet his mother when she was alive, and it helped me to understand a lot the way he is and the fascination he has for women and how well he knows women,” quipped Cruz. “He was raised by his mother and her sisters and neighbours, with a lot of women together. It’s a little bit of what you see in ‘Volver’— his 2006 film about a family of women and a matriarch who reappears as a ghost — and he was always watching and observing.”
His latest outing ‘Parallel Mothers’ seems like yet, yet another attempt to celebrate women.
(Author, movie critic Gautaman Bhaskaran has covered the Venice Film Festival for 20 years)
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