Parallel Mothers review: Penelope Cruz shines in Pedro Almodóvar film

However, little prepares us for how the film weaves the personal with the political, causing Janis to confront own biases and insecurities, and find connections, even as she is in the pursuit of justice for what happened to her great-grandfather. He was among the first victims of General Franco’s brutal crackdown in Spain, buried in a mass grave just outside her home town. To find him and put him to rest, Janis reaches out to a forensic anthropologist, Arturo (Elejalde), who is part of a historical memory project.

Arturo is the handsome subject of a very unlikely photo shoot, Janis the photographer with an artist’s eye, whose own home is full of photos of men and women (but mostly women) from the past. The attraction is evident, and before long, in one of those majestic scenes where a white curtain billows out of the window of an elegant hotel room, they make love, and Janis gets pregnant.

It’s the link to the past that binds them together, and soon, one realises what could be behind Janis’s instant friendship with Ana as well. Like her town composed almost entirely of distant relatives and old friends – and since this is an Almodóvar film, picturesque homes bathed in rich palettes and palates — Janis has lived her entire life with the memory of what happened all those many Spains ago. It has passed down in great detail down generations, the memories almost frozen to “that afternoon”, “that meal”, “that night”, when “they came to get” a great-grandfather, or an uncle, or a cousin.

Almodóvar has acknowledged that he had thought he could put this period of Spain’s history behind him by not talking about it in his films. Now in building this film of intense delicacy around it, he shows that there is no getting away from it.

While the Oscar-nominated Cruz is just very, very good as a woman confronting motherhood, loss and peace, Smit matches her step by step despite her obvious, striking youth. Sometimes, how their own personal, shattering story combines with the larger truth is jarring; often Almodóvar looks to be trying too hard to draw that parallel.

However, in asking us to confront the cost that unspoken lies entail, it pulls no punches. Like, it says, quoting Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, “No history is mute.”