Parallel Mothers review | Peter Bradshaw's film of the week

ot 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 ofand the unhealed wound of Spain’s fascist past.

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.

One mother is Janis, played by Penélope Cruz, a stylish photographer in her late 30s whose agent is the worldly Elena . The other mother is Ana , a serious-looking teenager whose family background is troubled. These heavily pregnant women share a hospital room and bond over their decision to go it alone.

The two women’s newborns are whisked away for observational reasons at the same time. But when Janis gets her baby home, events conspire to plant a seed of doubt in her mind: she orders a DNA test online, which means a swab test weirdly similar to the one Arturo carries out on the recovered bodies at the gravesite. The disquieting results mean that Janis has to get back in touch with Ana and re-establish their remarkable relationship.

The facts of the narrative make it sound contrived and implausible. Yet the sheer poetic conviction means that there is no problem believing that the personal is the political and that history, the future and the present are as one. Baby-swap dramas are nothing new: there was

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