Parallel Mothers (2021), Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, is a tapestry of mother/daughter relationships and separations whose centre is a sunlit mass reburial scene in a Spanish village. The Florida Project (2017) is Sean Baker’s tracking of a charismatic 6-year-old’s attachment to (and freedom from) her single mother in the claustrophobia of a purple motel in Kissimmee. Mommy (2014) offers the epic love struggle between a single mother and her volatile son in a Laval tenement. It gives us the other side of the story from holy terror, Xavier Dolan’s, first film: I Killed My Mother (2009).
I am transfixed by these movies because of how ferocious their mothers are. They’re glamorous, but that glamour only amplifies how high-velocity, high-volume, and well-spoken they are. This functions both in defence of their own autonomy and of their painful attachments to the children that fate parts them from. In Parallel Mothers, Penélope Cruz’s Janis exhorts her daughter figure/lover/co-mother to not keep secrets, a chef’s knife tucked ominously nearby matching her cadence. In The Florida Project, Bria Vinaite’s Britneyesque Hailey stamps off to nowhere in her child-size angel wings, tossing “Mind your own business, bro” at her landlord, arms stretched backwards like an adult-size hummingbird. Anne Dorval’s glittering Die, the mommy in Mommy, profanely arranges childcare while clipping in blonde, crimped extensions, hustling a lawyer date to protect her naughty son from litigation. And this ferocity has nothing on the moments where they each lose their children.
"...this ferocity has nothing on the moments where they each lose their children."
In a worldly reversal of the fairy tale, fathers are conspicuously absent. In all three movies, other women are the most apparent helpers. Parallel Mothers underscores this in the central relationship named in the title. In its climactic scene, Cruz wears a crisp Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie slogan shirt: We Should All Be Feminists. Each mother, in each film, has her crucial handmaiden. The only co-conspirators inhabiting these worlds of the mothers are other mothers.
Yet the directors, not being mothers themselves, tend to give us the child’s eye view: women emotionally larger than everyone around them, eyelined eyes darting for threats and sustenance in service to their children. In The Florida Project, Baker actually lets 6-year-old Moonee lead us around for most of the story. We last see her mother Hailey in a moment of agony, before Moonee gets away through the tall grass. In Parallel Mothers, Cruz triumphs over the separation from her child to lead the film to its political and creative conclusion, overshadowing the drama of the familial shenanigans that precede it. Personal grief is sublimated to larger mourning. In Mommy, Die not only endures the separation from her child but survives it, a grief the audience is permitted to witness and honour.
This follows the emotional logic of the film, which relentlessly—in spite of extreme, even speculative circumstances—allows the relationship to be what it is. By this I mean the melodrama of the separation of mother and child is not secondary to the power of their relationship. The narrative function Dolan devises to serve these characters raises an eyebrow: in an otherwise highly recognizable Quebec, Die is always capable of relinquishing Steve to a government-run asylum, should she be unable to cope with his behaviour. But this possibility does not define them. The relationship at the heart of the film—playful, destructive, needy, warm—is given the entire field of the film to play out. The rare films that offer this level of complexity in a relationship, usually love stories, rule my consciousness for months if not years.
"... the ancient Greeks blamed winter on the grieving of a bereaved mother, and spring on her daughter’s return."
The stories under discussion are all driven by an anxious core, they are set in anxious worlds, crumbling from one form of neglect or another. It is an understatement to call the climax of maternal safety and surrender a powerful promise of release. After all, the ancient Greeks blamed winter on the grieving of a bereaved mother, and spring on her daughter’s return. Soap actor Anna Lynn Mccord was inspired to share an original poem, on the first day of the bombings in Ukraine, on how, had she raised Putin, she could have prevented undue war. The disappearance of a child is a tragedy, the attention to the child’s mother’s life glaring, the desire to totemize the separation irresistible.
Baker and Dolan create women whose already immense responsibilities are strained by the poverty most mothers face but which isolates them in their overabundant North American skylines and in moviegoers’ eyes. Almodóvar, characteristically eclectic, leans sometimes into history, sometimes farce. He grants Janis, well-off and already otherwise superhuman, more unconventional sources of support. In The Florida Project and Parallel Mothers, Vinaite and Cruz’s characters, superbly rendered by their actors, are symbols of the worlds around them. They are not fully agents, however. They are not able to do more for their children than is offered, or recommended, by the world they inhabit.
In Mommy, Dorval’s Die (short for Diane, “i” dotted with a ballpoint heart) constantly challenges her constraints, storming into the lobbies, offices, and corridors she isn’t invited into. The decision she’s ultimately cornered into is still one she’s able to make her own. The specificity and isolation of her relationship with her nuclear son Steve is present and adaptable even as it pushes her to her limits. She is able to choose, for both him and for her, an outcome that neither of them want, but which is the result of the demanding love both co-created and visited upon them. This is how the unthinkable in relationships feels, not like a totemic sacrifice or a wretched symbol, but like the double bind of unpreventable suffering. The pain is in her responsibility to act, not in her inability to do so.
"The pain is in her responsibility to act, not in her inability to do so."
All three of these films emphasize how children have their own desires, whims, and conditions. Even outside of these movies, the directorial imaginary of motherhood is so often one of children rebelling. If it’s going to stand for something, watching a mother try to have faith in her own protection stands best for the simple reality of personal responsibility, stretched out and hammered as it is by outside circumstances. Our amniotic attachments can’t bear the collapse of the scaffolding of the failed state, and neither can our mothers’ attachment to us. Almodóvar allows his respectable Janis to fully mourn that which gave birth to her, not that which she gave birth to. Baker abandons Hailey, still a child herself, at her nadir. Dolan lets Die storm frame after frame, with all her attendant desires and errors. In Mommy, I love watching Anne Dorval bring the terror of agency to life. Motherhood is not, after all, always surrender. It is a series of choices where sometimes, nobody gets what they want.
Parallel Mothers (2021), Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, is a tapestry of mother/daughter relationships and separations whose centre is a sunlit mass reburial scene in a Spanish village. The Florida Project (2017) is Sean Baker’s tracking of a charismatic 6-year-old’s attachment to (and freedom from) her single mother in the claustrophobia of a purple motel in Kissimmee. Mommy (2014) offers the epic love struggle between a single mother and her volatile son in a Laval tenement. It gives us the other side of the story from holy terror, Xavier Dolan’s, first film: I Killed My Mother (2009).
I am transfixed by these movies because of how ferocious their mothers are. They’re glamorous, but that glamour only amplifies how high-velocity, high-volume, and well-spoken they are. This functions both in defence of their own autonomy and of their painful attachments to the children that fate parts them from. In Parallel Mothers, Penélope Cruz’s Janis exhorts her daughter figure/lover/co-mother to not keep secrets, a chef’s knife tucked ominously nearby matching her cadence. In The Florida Project, Bria Vinaite’s Britneyesque Hailey stamps off to nowhere in her child-size angel wings, tossing “Mind your own business, bro” at her landlord, arms stretched backwards like an adult-size hummingbird. Anne Dorval’s glittering Die, the mommy in Mommy, profanely arranges childcare while clipping in blonde, crimped extensions, hustling a lawyer date to protect her naughty son from litigation. And this ferocity has nothing on the moments where they each lose their children.
"...this ferocity has nothing on the moments where they each lose their children."
In a worldly reversal of the fairy tale, fathers are conspicuously absent. In all three movies, other women are the most apparent helpers. Parallel Mothers underscores this in the central relationship named in the title. In its climactic scene, Cruz wears a crisp Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie slogan shirt: We Should All Be Feminists. Each mother, in each film, has her crucial handmaiden. The only co-conspirators inhabiting these worlds of the mothers are other mothers.
Yet the directors, not being mothers themselves, tend to give us the child’s eye view: women emotionally larger than everyone around them, eyelined eyes darting for threats and sustenance in service to their children. In The Florida Project, Baker actually lets 6-year-old Moonee lead us around for most of the story. We last see her mother Hailey in a moment of agony, before Moonee gets away through the tall grass. In Parallel Mothers, Cruz triumphs over the separation from her child to lead the film to its political and creative conclusion, overshadowing the drama of the familial shenanigans that precede it. Personal grief is sublimated to larger mourning. In Mommy, Die not only endures the separation from her child but survives it, a grief the audience is permitted to witness and honour.
This follows the emotional logic of the film, which relentlessly—in spite of extreme, even speculative circumstances—allows the relationship to be what it is. By this I mean the melodrama of the separation of mother and child is not secondary to the power of their relationship. The narrative function Dolan devises to serve these characters raises an eyebrow: in an otherwise highly recognizable Quebec, Die is always capable of relinquishing Steve to a government-run asylum, should she be unable to cope with his behaviour. But this possibility does not define them. The relationship at the heart of the film—playful, destructive, needy, warm—is given the entire field of the film to play out. The rare films that offer this level of complexity in a relationship, usually love stories, rule my consciousness for months if not years.
"... the ancient Greeks blamed winter on the grieving of a bereaved mother, and spring on her daughter’s return."
The stories under discussion are all driven by an anxious core, they are set in anxious worlds, crumbling from one form of neglect or another. It is an understatement to call the climax of maternal safety and surrender a powerful promise of release. After all, the ancient Greeks blamed winter on the grieving of a bereaved mother, and spring on her daughter’s return. Soap actor Anna Lynn Mccord was inspired to share an original poem, on the first day of the bombings in Ukraine, on how, had she raised Putin, she could have prevented undue war. The disappearance of a child is a tragedy, the attention to the child’s mother’s life glaring, the desire to totemize the separation irresistible.
Baker and Dolan create women whose already immense responsibilities are strained by the poverty most mothers face but which isolates them in their overabundant North American skylines and in moviegoers’ eyes. Almodóvar, characteristically eclectic, leans sometimes into history, sometimes farce. He grants Janis, well-off and already otherwise superhuman, more unconventional sources of support. In The Florida Project and Parallel Mothers, Vinaite and Cruz’s characters, superbly rendered by their actors, are symbols of the worlds around them. They are not fully agents, however. They are not able to do more for their children than is offered, or recommended, by the world they inhabit.
In Mommy, Dorval’s Die (short for Diane, “i” dotted with a ballpoint heart) constantly challenges her constraints, storming into the lobbies, offices, and corridors she isn’t invited into. The decision she’s ultimately cornered into is still one she’s able to make her own. The specificity and isolation of her relationship with her nuclear son Steve is present and adaptable even as it pushes her to her limits. She is able to choose, for both him and for her, an outcome that neither of them want, but which is the result of the demanding love both co-created and visited upon them. This is how the unthinkable in relationships feels, not like a totemic sacrifice or a wretched symbol, but like the double bind of unpreventable suffering. The pain is in her responsibility to act, not in her inability to do so.
"The pain is in her responsibility to act, not in her inability to do so."
All three of these films emphasize how children have their own desires, whims, and conditions. Even outside of these movies, the directorial imaginary of motherhood is so often one of children rebelling. If it’s going to stand for something, watching a mother try to have faith in her own protection stands best for the simple reality of personal responsibility, stretched out and hammered as it is by outside circumstances. Our amniotic attachments can’t bear the collapse of the scaffolding of the failed state, and neither can our mothers’ attachment to us. Almodóvar allows his respectable Janis to fully mourn that which gave birth to her, not that which she gave birth to. Baker abandons Hailey, still a child herself, at her nadir. Dolan lets Die storm frame after frame, with all her attendant desires and errors. In Mommy, I love watching Anne Dorval bring the terror of agency to life. Motherhood is not, after all, always surrender. It is a series of choices where sometimes, nobody gets what they want.