Pedro Almodóvar’s poetic conviction and creative fluidity flow through this moving baby-swap drama about two single mothers and buried secrets from the Spanish civil war
Not parallel actually: that would mean they don’t touch. Here we have convergent mothers; intersecting mothers whose lives come together with a spark that ignites this moving melodrama, which audaciously draws a line between love, sex, the passionate courage of single mothers, the meaning of Lorca’s Doña Rosita the Spinster and the unhealed wound of Spain’s fascist past. Pedro Almodóvar’s new movie has the warmth and the grandiloquent flair of a picture from Hollywood’s golden age (something starring Bette Davis and Joan Fontaine maybe, with
music by Max Steiner) and the whiplash twists and addictive sugar rush bumps of daytime soap.
As ever with Almodóvar, there are gorgeously designed interiors with fierce, thick blocks of Mondrian colour, huge closeups of the female leads and overhead shots of food preparation. It’s impossible to watch this film without just feeling grateful that its director is still so fluent, so creative, still making us a gift of these films. There is a lot going on here, and perhaps the emotions and thoughts spill over the edges of its narrative form. But it would be obtuse not to let yourself travel downstream on this film’s emotional surge.