I’ve seen a number of art house films recently which characteristically were very slow and very opaque. So it was a not-so-guilty pleasure to view “Parallel Mothers” which moves at pace and has a clear narrative. Of course, I would have expected nothing less from the Spanish master Pedro Almod\u00f3var both wrote and directed this wonderful movie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the eight time, Almod\u00f3var cast his favourite actor, the beautiful and ever so talented Pen\u00e9lope Cruz. She plays the lead role of Janis, a middle-aged woman who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and befriends a teenager Ana (the ing\u00e9nue Milena Smit) who is having her baby in the same hospital at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a moving tale of love and loss, at both a very personal level of two first-time mothers facing emotional challenge and at a societal level of a country coming to terms with the horrors of a civil war still raw and recent. Except for the final sequences, the dialogue is constant so there are a lot of sub-titles but the viewer still needs to savour Almod\u00f3var’s trademark use of vibrant colour. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a gay director who loves working with women and giving them strong roles and there is only one significant male character (Israel Elejalde), but he is kindly and has a significant part in both the personal and the political levels of the story.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve seen a number of art house films recently which characteristically were very slow and very opaque. So it was a not-so-guilty pleasure to view “Parallel Mothers” which moves at pace and has a clear narrative. Of course, I would have expected nothing less from the Spanish master Pedro Almod\u00f3var both wrote and directed this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27666"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27669,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27666\/revisions\/27669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}