Volver (2007)

Director / Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar  Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine  Music: Alberto Iglesias

Stars: Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas

* * * * 1/2

Three generations of women feel the pull of the ghosts of the past – quite literally with the return of their supposedly long-deceased mother. Fantasy drama from Pedro Almodóvar starring Penelope Cruz.

“Volver” means “to return” or “coming back” in Spanish and, fittingly, director Pedro Almodóvar’s sixteenth feature revisits many of the themes and ideas that fans of his rich melodramas have come to love. As with many of his films, women, whether on the verge of a nervous breakdown or not, dominate. Volver is all about Almodóvar’s mothers, sisters and daughters, his overwhelming respect for their defiance of life’s travails and feckless men.

The film also marks the return of former muse Carmen Maura, making her first appearance for Almodóvar in some seventeen years. What this expert blend of surreal fantasy, buoyant comedy and poignant drama clearly isn’t, though, is a return to form. Almodóvar’s been at the top of his game for around a decade now, effortlessly reeling off work of the highest quality. In that sense, Volver is more continuation than revival.

Raimunda (Cruz) is a feisty, working-class Madrid wife and mother, supporting her unemployed husband and adolescent daughter Paula (Cobo), while clashing with her older sister, hairdresser Sole (Dueñas), and still finding the time to care for elderly ailing aunt Paula (Lampreave) still resident in the family’s small Manchegan home village. The eastern wind that blows through town is said to cause the region’s high rate of insanity and also fanned the flames that took Raimunda and Sole’s parents lives in a house fire years earlier.

In rapid progression, Raimunda’s world is shaken. Aunt Paula dies, though the village women seem nonchalantly convinced that Raimunda’s dead mother Irene had been helping Paula through her final days. Closer to home, Raimunda discovers that her daughter Paula has been regularly abused by her father and stabbed him to death in self-defence. Now Raimunda has to deal with the disposal of one dead body and the possible resurrection of another.

Such summarizing does little justice to the dense, detailed expertise of Almodóvar’s story and its nuanced handling. Genre-blending – and bending – is nothing new for the maker of Bad Education or Kika – but the way he makes the supernatural part and parcel of the everyday here is elegant simplicity itself. The hold that the dead have over the living is neatly established from the film’s opening shot of women diligently scrubbing and tending to tombstones in a wind-swept cemetery. At the same time, the baroque flourishes of earlier Almodóvar “women’s pictures” are largely absent (only one prostitute and no transsexuals?!), the focus on a more quietly impassioned, perhaps even more moving rendering of the joys – and pain – of family.

In a star turn directly descended from the golden age of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Anna Magnani, Cruz delivers an uncompromising, dominant performance worlds away from her Hollywood eye-candy turns – not that José Luis Alcaine’s glowing cinematography isn’t permanently seduced by her voluptuous sexuality. But to Cruz’s – and Almodóvar’s – credit, Raimunda fits neatly into an ensemble of stellar female performances. Maura is magnetic on her return in a key role and Blanco Portillo’s Agustina, a cancer-ridden family friend, also deserves special mention. And to show some semblance of gender equality, regular collaborator Alberto Iglesias contributes another fine, sprightly score.

Thought-provoking, heart-rending, life-affirming – essential Almodóvar.