I got the impression watching Pedro Almodóvar's latest film,
Parallel Mothers, in which Penelope Cruz's character is a professional photographer, that Cruz actually knows how to use a camera. On screen she shoots a variety of Canon, Leica, and Fuji cameras with apparent deftness; Phase One also gets a closing credit, but if one of their products made it into the final cut, I missed it. (Given my limited Spanish-language skills, trying to keep up with the rapid-fire dialog strained my concentration to the limit.)
Anyway, turns out Cruz has been making pictures as well as making pictures ever since she was a teenager.
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.)
Almodóvar tends to work repeatedly with the same actors—Cruz, along with her husband, Javier Bardem, are longtime members of his informal repertory company—and
he told New York Times reporter Kyle Buchanan that their lengthy collaboration has produced a special bond.
“Penélope has a blind faith in me,” Almodóvar wrote in a lengthy email. “She is convinced that I am a better director and writer than I really am. This blind faith fills me with the confidence to request anything of her, while the trust that she deposits in me allows her to do things during filming that she might not dare try with other directors because she knows I am watching her as if through a thousand eyes.”
The film reportedly may earn the pair Academy Award nominations. Although while my wife and I thought Cruz's performance was outstanding, we both came away with the impression that Almodóvar's plot, which interweaves an unrelated secondary storyline with the primary one, undermined the film's narrative punch.
