Opiniões dos críticos

[A] film that’s the director’s least showy and most sombre to date, and one that plunges headlong into Spanish history and specifically the unhealed national wound of the country’s fascist dictatorship under General Franco.

Almodóvar, just like his spiritual animal, Douglas Sirk, was always good at maternal melodramas. This one doesn’t lack drama, or DIY DNA kits, but the passion is missing... many scenes just don’t gel.

Parallel Mothers steals up on the viewer. For most of its running time, Pedro Almodovar’s 22nd feature appears to be a classic melodrama of the director’s late period – less busy with side characters and subplots than most – about the fallout from a mix-up at a maternity hospital. But it becomes something very different indeed.

The picture draws you in and holds you. It’s Almodóvar’s disarmingly moving tribute to the shifting, ever-bending bonds of motherhood, to the inexorable pull of family, and it may prove to be his most popular film since “All About My Mother” (1999), even though it couldn’t be more different in tone.

Parallel Mothers shapes up as a boisterous swapped-at-birth melodrama, full of mix-ups and moral quandaries, occasionally tilting towards farce. But first appearances are deceptive and the film belies its high-concept conceit.

But it is also, profoundly and sincerely, about deep love and loss. Women lose children; children lose their parents’ love; whole villages of men were executed during the Spanish Civil War and are still mourned; the nation as a whole is scarred and diminished by what was done and the failure to acknowledge and atone for it. Lightness of touch is not a virtue usually associated with the exuberant Madrileño maestro, but he draws these themes — another set of parallels — together with gossamer delicacy.

This is undoubtedly one of Almódovar’s breezier and more accessible domestic dramas. It was shot in and around Madrid in just one month this spring, and the most rebellious thing about the whole project is the poster’s image of a lactating nipple which upset the prudes at Instagram: the film itself is more discreet.

It is hard to force an easy ideological shape onto “Parallel Mothers”, which is so deeply invested in cheek swabs and skeleton bones and identifying the features of the parents in the child that it could almost be a tract in favor of biological essentialism, were it not for the warmth and vibrant, earthy love with which Almodóvar also portrays those relationships that exist outside blood ties.

The challenges and contradictions of being a woman bring soulful textures to scene after scene; even the potentially explosive revelation of sexual trauma is treated as one more crushing weight among many tests of a woman’s resilience.

Parallel Mothers is a sumptuous, riveting, flirtatiously transgressive melodrama – in other words, a Pedro Almodóvar film – which unfolds in present-day Madrid.

This is a film about coping with the trauma of death, but also the difficulties of comprehending how others create their own unique coping mechanisms to deal with that same trauma. There are moments of unimaginable sadness which segue smoothly into brightness and levity.

Parallel Mothers works in service of a reassuring concept: that our struggles, as mothers of children and children of mothers, have been shared by our forebears, and we should listen to the lessons they have for us.