DNA and Lineage in Almodóvar’s ‘Parallel Mothers’

Baby Cecilia having her DNA test

Almodóvar claims that his latest film connects motherhood and memory. He is trying to bring together the intimate and the political, a story of two mothers who share two babies, one dead, one alive, and the difficult history of the Spanish civil war and how it is playing out in Spain today. Try as he might, they don’t come together very well. The story of the civil war graves is a kind of bracket around…