Pedro Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers” moves both forward and backward, with love and politics on its mind. It follows the entwined lives of its two main characters, women (played by Milena Smit and Penélope Cruz) who give birth in the same hospital, over a period of several years. Their fates unfold under the shadow, at times imperceptible, at times unavoidable, of the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship that followed. The intersection of historical trauma and individual destiny isn’t an uncommon theme in contemporary cinema, but Almodóvar handles it with characteristic elegance and a profoundly melancholy humanism.
Almodóvar, the avatar of Spain’s youthful post-Franco awakening, is now in his early 70s. His film will close the festival this weekend, bookending a triptych of major work by his generational cohort. Joel Coen, born in 1954, and Jane Campion, born in 1957, both came on the scene, like Almodóvar, in the 1980s, and are both asserting their seniority by breaking out in new directions: Coen with his swift-moving, stirring “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (his first film without his brother, Ethan) and Campion with the tragic “Power of the Dog.” These movies look like throwbacks — “Macbeth” to the black-and-white Shakespeare of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier; “Power” to sprawling color epics like “Giant” — but they are also signs of life. And portents, maybe, of the future.