Almodovar, on revealing the past in “Parallel Mothers”

Pedro Almodóvar has a theory that his films featuring male protagonists, such as his 2019 semi-autobiographical “Pain and Glory,” are darker and bleaker.

“Definitely, I look inside when I have to talk about male characters,” says the La Mancha filmmaker.

“Parallel Mothers,” which Sony Pictures Classics premieres in US theaters on Friday, brings Almodovar back to the most melodramatic terrain. Penelope Cruz and Melina Smit play two single mothers who meet in the hospital, whose babies are accidentally switched at birth. This secret unfolds in unexpected ways as the film also investigates another hidden past: the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War.

In recent years, a national dialogue in Spain has sparked renewed interest and political disagreement over the exhumation of the graves of Francisco Franco’s regime, which began with the civil war in the 1930s and ended with his death in 1975. The remains of about 19,000 have been exhumed and 114,000 victims have been exhumed in the past four decades.

“Parallel Mothers” won’t be as self-reflexive as Almodovar’s latest film, but it is the 72-year-old director’s most politically introspective and the first to grapple with the legacy of Franco’s government. Almodovar emerged as a filmmaker in the post-Franco years of liberated Spain.

When “Parallel Mothers” screened this year at the New York Film Festival, Almodovar met a reporter at a downtown hotel where he spoke a mixture of Spanish and English with the help of a translator about a movie like Her 1999’s “All About Mom” ​​masterpiece focused primarily on motherhood.

He said, “I don’t know how many mothers I’ll be in the future, but he’s still one of my favorite characters in society, because you can make a thousand different films, even in a thousand different genres.”

Responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Associated Press: She produced a short film that was praised, “The Human Voice” and “Parallel Mothers” during the pandemic. Has your view of cinema changed in the past two years?

Almodovar: Not exactly. I mean, it led to my need to write and direct films. Oddly enough, it made me more aware of the loneliness in which I live. Because feeling lonely, despite the fact that I’m doomed to lock up, was something I’ve actually experienced lately for writing and all that. I think now I get over the feeling of loneliness more by going out a little more, and going out to eat with friends, precisely because it seemed to me so sad when I was sentenced to confinement I discovered that I was used to confinement.

AP: You started the pandemic by writing a great memoir about the movies you’ve watched.

Almodóvar: At that time I was sick, because I had contracted the virus in the first week. Even before the first week. I had just arrived from Los Angeles after attending the Oscars in late February, felt like I had the flu and stayed home. Three days later, they announced the arrest. The days were so long that I tried to talk and write something about the situation. One day I was naughty and took to the streets only to see Madrid completely deserted. It’s a pretty cool picture that I wanted to have, so I pretended to go out to buy something just to see the city.

Associated Press: It must have been ironic that in the midst of a pandemic I was making a movie where swabs and lab tests, to prove girls’ motherhood, are a key part of the plot.

Almodovar: When I was writing the movie a year ago, it was more like science fiction. But when we made the movie, it was familiar to me that Penelope uses rods for genetic analysis.

Associated Press: What initially sparked your interest in making a film about exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War?

Almodóvar: Well, I think that has connected me with maturity both cinematically and also personally. I have long wanted to make a film about graves, which, oddly enough, Spanish cinema has never dealt with. It’s a really sad thing. In 2013 or 14, some UN rapporteurs came to inspect the situation in our country and were very surprised that the person who called to tell them about the opening of the graves was really the generation of the descendants of the victims. This is the generation that was already born into a democracy. The rapporteurs said Spain had a very bad relationship with its past. It seems to me that it is very important for young people to find out what happened at that time, to find out what happened to their grandparents, or to some of their parents, though the problems young people now face are other.

Associated Press: Your entry point into that story comes through a similar melodrama to the ones in your other films that mask the film’s political intent.

Almodovar: I didn’t just want to make a movie about mass graves. She did this through the character Janice (Cruise) who has a legacy from her grandmother who saved and raised her because she was an orphan. This woman is trying to open them, because opening the graves is not only to define them, but to prove their existence simultaneously. What Franco did by condemning them to a mass grave was to snatch all of humanity, condemning it to nothingness. I was more interested in doing it through this mother, because this mother is searching for the truth of Spanish historical memory, but at the same time she is living with the moral dilemma that she does not act in her life with the same truth. In his life there is a great contradiction and this is the point that intrigued me the most. He united two truths: let us state the general truth of our country with the intimate truth of it. And this contradiction is what I want to talk about.

Associated Press: Your first films in the 1980s followed years of censorship in Spain and made a major contribution to the liberating post-Franco era in the arts. I said before that Franco must die in order for you to live. Was ‘Parallel Mothers’ motivated by a new rise of fascism?

Almodovar: When I started making films, Franco had just died. I could never have made a movie with Franco alive. In Spain, because we had that horrible experience of a civil war, which I think is the worst example of a war, I thought we were vaccinated against it. Looking at that, let’s say five years ago, the far right in France was growing, here Trump appears, in Brazil appears Bolsonaro, etc., but I thought that the far right would never reach Spain. I sometimes think that’s the effect of Trump, who has given voice to so many extremists scattered around the world who have thought, “If this guy says these things, I think like that, there’s no reason not to express them.” He removed the prejudices of all these extremists and far-right extremists in Brazil, Italy, France and Spain. Now things are happening that would have been impossible in the ’90s or ’80s. Now there are more and more homophobic attacks, more and more xenophobia. It is a very negative feeling to see that all the values ​​we fought for now have to be defended again with great vigor.

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Follow Jake Coyle on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP.