The first time Penélope Cruz appeared in a Pedro Almodóvar film, her character gave birth on a Madrid public bus.
The young actor's eight minutes on screen in Live Flesh (1997) forged a lifelong working relationship with the Spanish director, leading to Cruz vehicles Volver (2006), Broken Embraces (2009), and now Parallel Mothers, their eighth and most hypnotic film together.
As such, her casting as a middle-aged mum-to-be might seem like a wink back at a shared past – but Almodóvar's outré girl-gang melodramas have always overflowed with new life.
His early movies were part of La Movida, a movement whose volcanic eruption of sex, drugs and punk rock joyously blasted away memories of the grim years of the Franco dictatorship.
Populated by ungovernable women, the LGBTQ+ community, singers, filmmakers, nuns who drop acid, and several future Hollywood stars, they conjured an exuberant alternate vision of Spain.
Four decades on, that hot-blooded irreverence has cooled into twilight melancholy – most sublimely, 2019's Pain and Glory – though the 72-year-old hasn't lost any of his spirit, or his love for eye-popping production design.
Most of Parallel Mothers takes place inside a modernist Madrid apartment filled with books and art, and decked out in red panelling and aquamarine tiles, which could easily be mistaken for Almodóvar's own pad.
The domestic tale closely orbits two women, photographer Janis (Cruz) and the teenage Ana (newcomer Milena Smit), who meet when they give birth to daughters in the same ward on the same day.
Both are single mothers: by Janis's hospital bedside is her riotous best friend Elena (Almodóvar favourite Rossy de Palma); Ana's only support is her distant, prim and proper actress mother Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón).
As if cosmically ensnaring their fates, the synchronised births mean the two women form a bond and then look to each other as they negotiate life's unexpected turns and twists.
This eventually leads them to move in together, sharing – amongst other things – cooking lessons and mouth-watering tortilla de patatas.
Inside this sweeping exploration of motherhood (with mothers forming a near-neurotic obsession in Almodóvar's cinema) respect is shown alike for women with maternal instincts and for those without; just as moving as scenes in which Janis wakes panic-stricken in the night, acutely feeling the absence of her child, are those in which Teresa explains why she chose her career over her daughter.
The gripping drama moves gracefully, with elliptical time jumps cutting, for example, from a bedroom romp to curtains evocatively shimmying in the wind, to Janis's pronounced baby bump.
Soap opera-level revelations are pulled off with the lightest touch.
In a performance that won her Best Actress at the Venice International Film Festival and is likely to earn her an Oscar nomination next month, Cruz as Janis is a delightful mess of contradictions, boldly in control when it comes to how she wants to live her life (in one on-the-nose moment she wears a T-shirt that says "WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS") yet denying more uncomfortable truths.
Just as impressive, Smit as Ana transforms before our eyes from an abandoned, bewildered teen into an emotionally grounded, bleach-blonde tomboy in designer threads.
A ready-made poster girl for a new generation that has no need of labels, Ana organically embraces fluidity while rebelling against conventional ideas of family, gender and sexuality – as the film reminds us what a pleasure it is to spend time in Almodóvar's universe.
The biggest surprise, though, lies in the way the film links this tale of two mothers to one of a country confronting the truth of its past; in particular, the estimated 114,000 people killed in the Spanish Civil War's White Terror whose whereabouts are still unknown today.
Early on, we learn that Janis's great-grandfather was taken in the night by fascists; her late grandmother asked her to help exhume his body from an unmarked mass grave and give him a proper burial.
The handsome forensic archaeologist father of Janis's child, Arturo (Israel Elejalde), happens to be a member of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), a real-life organisation that collects testimonies from families and communities, and works to excavate and identify bodies — filling a gap left by insufficient government funding.
(In the time since the film was made, a new Democratic Memory Law has been put forward and funding has been renewed.)
In the movie's final moments, the act of remembrance and healing comes full circle as Janis's makeshift new family gathers to honour those lost, and present dissolves into past.
As Almodóvar said when debuting the film last year, "The Spanish society has a debt with the families and the victims. Until the moment that they have opened all the unmarked graves, I think that the Civil War has not ended."
Almodóvar closes with a quote from Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano, reminding us that "no history is mute". In Parallel Mothers, he has crafted his most explicitly political film yet.
Parallel Mothers is in cinemas now.
