Here is a longer version of my Volver review which appeared in the latest issue of my high school newspaper, The Kerronicle.
Volver
d. Pedro Almodovar, 2006
An overhead shot of a desolate kitchen somewhere in Madrid. A lifeless body, paper towels soaking the blood around it. A housewife (Penélope Cruz) meticulously cleans up the mess, and as she begins to stuff the corpse into her refrigerator, the doorbell rings.
This remarkable sequence from Pedro Almodóvar’s sensational new film, Volver, which opens this Friday at the Angelika, takes place about 15 minutes into the movie, and it stands as a constant reminder of the morbid backdrop for Almodóvar’s tender, compassionate story about a family of women.
Volver (“to return” in Spanish) opens to an extended shot of a windy cemetery. The audience is introduced to Raimunda (Cruz), her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo), and her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas), who are there to visit their mother’s grave. Irene (Carmen Maura) passed away four years prior, and it seems the family is well adjusted by now. After the cemetery, they drive by the small town where they grew up; they visit Aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave) and Agustina (Blanca Portillo), who takes care of Paula and whose own mother has been missing for four years.
Everything in the film seems rather calm and delicate up to this point, then, on cue, all hell breaks loose (this is, after all, an Almodóvar film). We see young Paula crying, telling her mother that the man she believes to be her father (Antonio de la Torre) tried to rape her. She grabbed a knife to scare him and ended up killing him. As Raimunda is deposing of the body, Sole calls to say Aunt Paula has died. Raimunda assures her that she is much too busy to attend the funeral, and urges Sole to go alone. While there, Sole catches a glimpse of her dead mother. As it turns out, Irene is not yet gone, and decides to come back to Madrid with Sole. In Almodovar’s world, death is not enough to keep a mother from loudly kissing her daughters.
This is the background of Volver. Recounting the rest of Almodóvar’s ingenious, gorgeously explosive story would only diminish from one’s viewing experience. The film’s formal aspects, however, may be even more accomplished than his narrative aims. He bathes his film in bright, lush colors that will be a wonder to see on the big screen; having only seen the film twice on an imported DVD in preparation for this review, I am quite anxious for a proper viewing. Volver’s soundtrack is also very vibrant, from the loud smooching sounds and the whistling of the wind down Almodóvar’s streets, to the beautiful strands of Alberto Iglesias’ lively score (the director’s exaggerated sound effects play a key role in establishing the relationship between the women in the film).
By the film’s end, Almodóvar’s title gains meaning. In a way, he’s returning to a type of film he hasn’t made since 1999’s All About My Mother (also starring Cruz). For the past couple of years, he has focused on films mainly about men: both of the female characters in 2002’s Talk to Her were comatose throughout the film; The Bad Education (2004) was a post-modern noir where the closest thing to a female protagonist was Gael García Bernal in drag. In Volver, the men are, quite literally, disposable. Almodóvar, like Josef von Sternberg and Rainer Werner Fassbinder before him, is a director who adores women, which is precisely the reason why Volver is such a success. Even at the points of highest melodrama, his film never feels exploitative, and it’s encouraging to see that a man can be so deft at writing dialogue for women My favorite exchange: “My mother has died, you must be her ghost or her spirit” “Yes, whatever you want, but get me out of the trunk of your car.”
An ensemble film though it may be—Cannes gave all of its female leads a collective “Best Actress” award earlier this year—Volver clearly belongs to Cruz. Her performance as Raimunda, balancing her husband’s corpse and a mother coming back from the dead, among other things, is as endearing as any I’ve seen in a long time.
It’s clear that Almodóvar has reached the point in his career where he can take any standard family story, add some Almodóvarian touches, and turn out an outright masterpiece. Seemingly rereading Fassbinder on the way back to Douglas Sirk, he brings together low camp—there’s always a place for a prostitute or a drag queen in his films—and high melodrama into an intensely involving and undeniably moving experience. The final scene is almost too lovely. “Don’t tell me that,” Irene calmly says. “I’ll cry. And you know ghosts don’t cry.”
