Nathaniel reporting from Venice - Day 1, Part 1
"Dont Look Now" .. the most famous Venice movie?
Dearest readers, what's the first thing you think of when you think of Venice? My first memory of the city, vicariously, is Madonna's gyrating gondola ride in the "Like a Virgin" music video. Nothing as seismically sexy is likely to occur in pandemic 2021 (tourists and masks kinda kill that vibe) but I did witness the paparazzi chasing a celebrity the literal minute I exited the airport to board a boat to my airbnb. Seeing paparazzi in the country that invented the word was fun but I didn't recognize the celebrity (short girl with black hair and baggy clothing with heavily tatted tall boyfriend?). Auspicious beginnings.
Venice is one of the most beautiful cities you'll ever see this side of Copenhagen, and that's surely due to all the canals; Oh to live on the water! Travelling to the movies each morning by boat is going to be heaven. Coming back to the main island at night to sleep, though, is as eery as any shot from Don't Look Now (1973), since every street feels like walking down a dark alley, even in the middle of the day. The buildings are uncomfortably close together -- sometimes you have to turn sideways for other pedestrians -- and the streets are utterly mazelike. With the caveat that I have a terrible sense of direction, I was lost four times in the first 24 hours.
My first screening was the opening night film Pedro Almodóvar's Parallel Mothers so the festival began, figuratively, with Penélope Cruz asking the audience to smize...
PARALLEL MOTHERS
Almodóvar's favourite muse, Penélope Cruz, is behind the lens this time for the film's opening scene. She plays a photographer named Janis who is shooting an anthropologist (Israel Elejalde) for a profile on his career. She asks him to smile with his eyes and later banters with him about the photoshoot prop, a skull, that the magazine wanted. 'We're not going to do that,' she scoffs, after mimicking Hamlet's gravedigger. (But Pedro will, Janis. We sense it already!)
As it turns out, Janis does have death on her brain. After the shoot she asks the anthropologists advice about the legal procedures around having unmarked graves exhumed. She and her relatives want to give their ancestors lost to Spain's violent Falangists, a proper burial. It's a serious request but there's also immediate chemistry between the photographer and her subject. Wasting no time in its swiftly edited opening scenes, we move directly from talk of death to sex to new life; Janis is nine months pregnant in, like, two cuts!
It's the whole human life cycle, albeit jumbled chronologically! But Almodóvar loves braiding multiple themes into a movie. His 23rd feature is filled with photographic imagery, like that opening scene and a typically glorious title sequence which riffs on contact sheets, but it's not about the movies this time or even the act of looking. The titular characters, Janis and young Ana (Milena Smit in only her second feature), are very pregnant mothers-to-be basically as soon as we meet them, but Almodóvar has already warned us with the rug pull of that "skull" chatter that, like, Pain and Glory before it, this movie has death on its mind. Well not just death. Parallel Mothers is also about family mythology, shared histories, and Spain's Civil War... and of course Motherhood.
The question is not whether or not Parallel Mothers is exquisite to look at and beautifully acted (it's Almodóvar and Cruz so the pleasures are abundant) but how well the film braids its multiple themes together. I confess wanting a second go at the picture to ease my doubts that it doesn't quite pull it off. The individual strands are gorgeous (and surprisingly not deep red with Almodóvar shifting the color palette a bit) but the braiding feels slightly offcentered. The opening scene plants the seeds of what the movie will become, but it abandons the story of Janis's family ghosts for well over an hour while it dives deeper and deeper into the more traditional (and more predictable) melodrama of Ana and Janis's twisting identities as mothers and friends. We spend so much time with Janis and Ana that the supporting characters are largely underdeveloped despite being initially intriguing like Ana's actress mother (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), Janis's best friend/agent (Rossy de Palma), and Janis's babydaddy (Israel Elejalde). In a very surprising turn of events the film's dry and sober B Plot (the quest for exhumation) is actually more fascinating that its florid A plot, and packs the film's most revelatory visual and emotional punch, too; would that they could have traded places!
Minor caveats aside, what a pleasure that Almodóvar is still challenging himself and his audience at 71 years of age. Parallel Mothers isn't the late-career masterpiece Pain and Glory was (that was always going to be a tough act to follow) but it's another gorgeous showcase for Cruz's sensitivity and skill as a film star and one of the director's most ambitious and political pictures. B+