Parallel Mothers Review: Historical Healing of the Spanish Civil War, Shared Wounds, and Motherhood Between Two Women

Living in an age of loss, we all often discover our own names only by passing through the pain of others. The deficiencies and ruptures that life throws at us without warning sometimes approach us as tragedies too overwhelming to bear, but the warmth of another person flowing through the crevices of those wounds allows us to stand up once more.

Encountering another person as a mirror at the very moment we have lost ourselves, and embracing each other’s pain reflected in that mirror, may be the most sublime form of salvation that human beings can perform.

🌿 Moments When This Film Deeply Permeates

• When two women, who must bear life alone, erase their fears by relying on each other’s breathing in the isolated space of a hospital room
• When a strange yet inevitable love, which shatters even the absolute condition of blood ties, completely shakes up the lives of both women
• When an individual’s secret meets the immense historical trauma of a nation, finally breaking the silence and rising above ground
• Thus, at the end of this elegant narrative, we face the essence of a grand solidarity that transcends the myth of bloodlines.

🎞 Note Before Viewing the Film

This work deals with a deep emotional connection and physical relationship between two women, and includes scenes where characters confess their inner wounds, such as past trauma and sexual assault. Rather than relying on provocative depictions, it is a profound drama focused on the relationships and psychological shifts between the characters, as well as the process of healing historical pain.

🎬 Film Info

• Title: Parallel Mothers (Madres paralelas, 2021)
• Director: Pedro Almodóvar
• Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar
• Country: Spain
• Genre: Drama
• Running Time: 123 minutes
• Platform: Naver Series On, Wave, Watcha, Apple TV
• Cast: Penélope Cruz, Milena Smit, Israel Elejalde, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón

📖 Parallel Mothers, The Prelude to a Fated Entanglement and Secret Born in a Hospital Room [No Spoilers]

Janis, a successful photographer, meets Arturo, a forensic anthropologist, to excavate a mass grave of Spanish Civil War victims in her hometown, leading to an unexpected pregnancy. Deciding to raise the child alone in her mid-forties, Janis meets Ana, a teenage girl, in a maternity ward.

The two women give birth to their respective daughters on the same day, forming a brief but intense bond, and maintain a peculiar connection by exchanging contact information even after being discharged. However, when Arturo sees Janis’s daughter and raises doubts because the child does not resemble him, Janis submits a DNA test under a heavy cloud of suspicion.

Confronted with the shocking truth that the child is not her biological daughter, Janis decides to bury the secret, fearing she might lose the child who has already entered deep into her heart. After time passes, she hears devastatingly sad news from Ana, whom she encounters by chance, and the lives and motherhood of the two women begin to be swept into an uncontrollable vortex of fate.

🩸 Parallel Mothers Analysis: The Psychological Power Dynamics of Two Women Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Myth of Blood

🧬 Solidarity of Motherhood and Guilt Built Upon Falsehood

The film Madres paralelas isolates the mythical concept of motherhood from the realm of pure blood relations, re-establishing it upon the human emotions of guilt and responsibility. Janis chooses silence despite knowing her child, Cecilia, is not her biological daughter, which stems from a primal fear of loss rather than a moral defect.

Janis’s subsequent action of bringing Ana, who has lost her biological daughter, into her own space is a peculiar juxtaposition of selfish concealment and an altruistic desire for salvation. The strange power dynamics between the one holding the secret and the one who experienced the loss become further complicated as the two develop into physical lovers. Through this inversion of relations, director Pedro Almodóvar deconstructs the category of the “normal family” prescribed by patriarchy as if mocking it.

🏛 An Individual’s Lost Child and a Nation’s Lost Father

The greatest achievement of this film lies in its flawless parallel arrangement of the private narrative—Janis’s hidden secret (the switched child)—and the public narrative of the Spanish Civil War. The internal anguish Janis suffers while hiding her secret precisely mirrors the historical trauma of modern Spain, which was forced into silence with the slaughtered remains of the Franco regime left buried.

The film continuously emphasizes through the characters’ mouths that turning a blind eye to the truth may bring immediate tranquility, but it can never be a permanent cure. The painful process of confessing the secret and returning the child is aesthetically completely equivalent to the process of historical liquidation through digging up the earth to face the remains of ancestors.

🕯 Solidarity of Wounds Engraved Layer by Layer and the Growth of Dignity

The trauma of collective sexual assault suffered by Ana and the negligence of her mother, Teresa, who ignored it, symbolize the violence inflicted upon women by the patriarchal social system. In contrast, Janis is an autonomous individual who carves out her own life without the assistance of Arturo, the patriarchal order.

When two women walking different trajectories unite through the medium of a child in a single space, their solidarity evolves beyond mere friendship or romance into a form of mutual salvation that fills each other’s deficiencies. A temporary rupture occurs the moment the secret is exposed, but this rupture is proven to be an essential collapse to establish true trust rather than the destruction of the relationship.

🕳 Reinterpretation of the Ending: The Face of Truth Rising Above Ground, Ending the Burial of Silence

In the final part of the film, the scene where Janis confesses the entire truth to Ana and returns the right to raise Cecilia is the beginning of a complete reconciliation, not a catastrophe. Even if the binding power of blood relations is lost, the time of rearing and the emotional alliance shared by the two women remain an eternal bond that transcends physical separation.

The sight of Janis, Ana, and the child standing side-by-side in front of the excavated remains of the mass grave in the final scene demonstrates human dignity looking directly into past wounds. Only the pain of facing the truth liberates individuals and nations from the eternal prison of silence. Through its ending, this film declares that the act of calling out the names of the lost is the most noble ritual of growth that the living must perform.

🔎 Concerning the Parallel Mothers Ending and the Method of Female Representation

Q1. How should we interpret the criticism that the homosexual relationship between Janis and Ana develops somewhat abruptly in the film?

Some viewers raise the point that the section where the emotions of the two main characters develop into a romantic relationship feels sudden within the flow of the narrative. This criticism is a natural perspective that can arise when one is accustomed to the typical Hollywood romance structure centered on cause-and-effect relationships.

However, the physical and emotional union of the two in this work should be interpreted not as a simple romantic plot, but as an instinctive gravity felt by human beings sharing extreme isolation and secrets. When the sense of loss from losing a child and the guilt of a switched child collide in the same space, their absolute dependence on each other manifests in the form of sexuality. Rather than romanticizing this, the director uses it as an aesthetic device to show that two women can heal each other without a patriarchal helper, leaving the judgment entirely to the audience.

Q2. Is the setting where Janis becomes pregnant with Arturo’s child again at the end not a regression of an autonomous female narrative?

There is a debate over whether Janis’s appearance at the end, pregnant with Arturo’s child again, signifies a return to a traditional heterosexual-centered family structure. However, it is difficult to view this simply as an incorporation into the patriarchal system.

Throughout the film, Janis is a character who has controlled her own life through her own choices without being subordinate to Arturo. The pregnancy at the end is closer to a metaphor for “new life and the future” met in a state where all secrets and historical traumas have been cleared, rather than an extension of past negative relationships or deficiencies. Since the solidarity with Ana has not been severed either but continues through the medium of Cecilia, it would be reasonable to interpret this pregnancy as an expansion of the female community that has risen above past wounds to embrace a broader meaning of family.

✨ Parallel Mothers, The Breath of the Future Blooming Atop the Remains of the Past

The tragedies buried beneath the immense wheels of history and the secrets hidden inside a family’s home ultimately meet as a single river before the solemn imperative that ‘the truth must be revealed.’ Using the most private emotion of motherhood as a microscope, director Pedro Almodóvar has precisely deconstructed the massive strata of modern history that is the Spanish Civil War.

This work is not a melodrama that merely praises the bond of those who share blood; rather, it proves the greatness of solidarity that arises when one fully accepts the wounds of another as one’s own. The silence that covers up past trauma is merely a postponement, not peace, and we can walk toward a dignified future only by staring directly at the truth. Only those who dig up the earth of oblivion to face their wounds gain the qualification to finally possess an intact life tomorrow.

💬 Questions That Awaken Your Narrative

Fully understanding the pain of another may be something close to an impossibility. We often choose to keep a proper distance from others to avoid being hurt, or choose to remain silent while covering up secrets.

If you were faced with a truth that is difficult to handle, would you choose the path of confessing the truth and standing in solidarity even if it is painful like Janis, or would you choose eternal silence to protect what is precious to you?

🪐 Violet Screen’s Curation: Another Depth of Female Narrative

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• Green Night (2023)
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