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The Visions of Penélope Cruz - The New York Times
Jan 12, 2022 4 mins, 20 secs

“When I look back, I don’t remember it as suffering,” Penélope Cruz said of playing Janis in “Parallel Mothers,” because “for me, she was alive.”Credit...Camila Falquez for The New York Times.

You have to wonder if Penélope Cruz manifested her first phone call from Pedro Almodóvar.

Cruz was still a fledgling actress — it was 1992, and her first two movies, “Jamón Jamón” and “Belle Epoque,” had only just come out — but as she batted lines back and forth with the far more established Almodóvar in his kitchen, their connection couldn’t have been more natural.

If you’re Cruz and Almodóvar, you eventually give in to it and make seven movies together.

Their latest, “Parallel Mothers,” is also one of their greatest, starring Cruz as a mother wrestling with a terrible secret.

“Parallel Mothers” would have made it three in a row: As Almodóvar teased out the story line, he told Cruz that she should play young Ana, one of two single mothers whose newborns are switched at birth.

But even then, Cruz’s intuition kicked in, and she found herself drawn to the older mother, Janis, a self-possessed photographer dealing with an unexpected pregnancy and a dark chapter in Spain’s history.

The project would take two decades to come to fruition, but in 2020, when Almodóvar told Cruz that he had resurrected “Parallel Mothers” and now had her in mind to play Janis … well, isn’t it nice when something clicks so satisfyingly into place.

Like Janis, Cruz loves photography, which has been a hobby for the actress since she was a teenager.

(It’s a kick to see her wielding a camera in the first scene of “Parallel Mothers,” instructing a man how to pose for her, since Cruz came of age as an ingénue muse for such men.) She is chic and cosmopolitan like Janis, mixing jeans and designer clothes in a way that is stylish but never overproduced.

But not long into “Parallel Mothers” comes a perpendicular plot twist, when Janis learns the truth about the child she presumed was hers.

As she continues to keeps that secret from Ana, Janis splits in two: She must act like a happy, untroubled mother even as her guilt accrues and an anguished outcome seems all but certain.

“To be able to express one feeling and its opposite feeling at once is incredibly difficult,” said Almodóvar, “and Penélope prevails, even though it’s not in her nature.” Cruz asked for an unusually long rehearsal process of a few months, trying to reach the core of a character who’s in constant conflict with her own feelings.

Still, she kept all those feelings contained, as Janis has to, until a climactic moment proved so harrowing to film that Almodóvar had to help a devastated Cruz get up from the floor afterward.

“I would like for you to be able to do it without suffering this much,” Almodóvar told her then.

“When I look back, I don’t remember it as suffering,” she said, “because it was for her, it was for Janis, or for all the women that could be in a similar situation of losing what they love the most.

So when Cruz says “Parallel Mothers” is the hardest thing she’s ever done, she means that in a good way: Though Janis and Cruz initially seem so similar, playing this woman brought Cruz further from herself than she ever could have anticipated.

ASK THE PEOPLE who know her best to describe Penélope Cruz, and one adjective always comes up.

English-language directors didn’t always know what to do with her, and she was often cast as the limpid love interest in films like “The Hi-Lo Country” and “All the Pretty Horses.” Some of her movies popped, like the 2001 doubleheader of “Blow” and “Vanilla Sky,” but it wasn’t until she reteamed with Almodóvar for “Volver” in 2006 that she earned her first Oscar nomination and truly showed Hollywood what kind of full-bodied lead performance she was capable of.

“Even though I knew that Hollywood would take an interest in her, she has not developed to her full capacity in her English-speaking roles.” Though he felt Cruz had done her best American work so far in the 2018 limited series “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” in which she played a steely Donatella Versace, Almodóvar said, “the best of Penélope in the American market has yet to come.”.

“I wouldn’t have done something very different from her,” Cruz said.

“You told me that when I get old, you will take care of me,” he said at the end of the video

It may seem unusual for an older man to ask a younger friend to become his mother, but the way Almodóvar sees motherhood has always felt bracingly untraditional: Cruz played a pregnant nun for him in “All About My Mother,” after all

To Cruz and to Almodóvar, motherhood isn’t a mere caretaking position: If you’re lucky enough to mother someone who matters to you, it can be the ultimate expression of empathy and devotion

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