Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar has been directing for more than 30 years (his breakthrough, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, came out in 1988) and he knows that if you want to make a point about religion or politics or abuse, don’t preach – tell a story. His preferred medium is melodrama and in this he excels; who can forget Penélope Cruz as the pregnant nun with AIDS in All About My Mother?
Cruz, radiantly beautiful more than two decades later and one of Almodóvar’s muses, is here an older, first-time mother giving birth in the same suite as a young and confused girl named Ana, who’s not even sure who is the father of her child. Both women have their babies temporarily removed for treatment and they form a friendship, exchanging numbers before they go home.
