Film Review: Postmemory in Almodóvar’s Bad Education & Parallel Mothers [01-13-22]

Framing the Dead to Expose the Past:

Catalyzing Postmemory in Almodóvar’s Bad Education (2004) and Parallel Mothers (2021)

On a movie set, a fratricidal brother hyperventilates after acting a scene presenting just one imagined variation of his brother’s murder. In a maternity ward, two women—whose lives are haunted by trauma—calm their breathing while birthing the new Spanish generation. These scenes represent pivotal moments in two of auteur filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s works—Bad Education (Education, 2004) and Parallel Mothers (Parallel, 2021). In the imaginative realms of postmemory creation, both films contravene a resigned amnesia towards epistemic violence committed by the Catholic Church, political genocide, and patriarchal violence. The director denies audiences the relaxation of linear narratives that promote the suspension of disbelief—instead, he emphasizes the artifice embedded in his narratives, which forces audiences to understand these stories as fictionalized accounts of real-world situations. In Education, Almodóvar undermines the audience’s perception of reality and character credibility by presenting memories told in visualized flashbacks, fluid identity shifting of characters, and framed stories either conveyed in posthumous writing or in inset film narratives. In Parallel, Almodóvar presents mise-en-scène filled with portraits positioned facing the camera—their returned gazes issuing urgent calls for justice. In these politicized films, Almodóvar presents film as a catalyst mechanism for the post-violence generations to seek reparations and reconciliation—yet, the director offers complex social commentaries, as certain characters fail to achieve justice while others achieve a bittersweet peace. Almodóvar’s films join the collective repository of postmemory where Spanish society grapples with its national history and identity. These two works present imaginative contributions to the transitional justice process and deny the hegemonies of church, government, and patriarchy the ability to harm with impunity. The dead continue to speak through the celluloid’s interstitial nature where film wedges open the portal between the dead and the living to serve as a platform for memory, testimony, and justice.