Two women, Janis (Penélope Cruz) and Ana (Milena Smit), coincide in a hospital room where they are going to give birth. Both are single and became pregnant by accident. Janis, middle-aged, doesn’t regret it and she is exultant. The other, Ana, an adolescent, is scared, repentant and traumatised. Janis tries to encourage her while they move like sleepwalkers along the hospital corridors. The few words they exchange in these hours will create a very close link between the two which, by chance, develops and complicates, and changes their lives in a decisive way.
Almodóvar completed the screenplay for Parallel Mothers during the pandemic lockdown. “I just needed to fill my time with an activity that consumed me completely," he says.
“I grew up surrounded by women: my mother and all our neighbours. Even when my mother couldn’t be with us and needed us to be taken care of, she would take us to the neighbours. All throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, I grew up surrounded by women,” says Almodóvar. “I think of all the female characters I’ve written and being inspired by these women and their stability to overcome anything. By their ability to fight and by their strength. However, I think the big difference in Parallel Mothers is that these are contemporary mothers. These mothers are not mothers that have resonances, say, to my own mother. One mother is a very conservative mother. Then you have Ana, who’s a very young woman with a new maternity linked up to the tragic story of her rape. And then you’ve got Pénelope’s character, a contemporary mother and a single mother who has to really struggle to balance her role as a mother and as someone who has to sustain a family.”
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