Review of Volver (2006) by Christopher S — 17 Mar 2010

Pedro Almodóvar is a director who is not afraid to do what he wants in his movies. He is not afraid to say that, as a gay man, he loves women and he loves breasts. He is not afraid to have gratuitous scenes simply because he wants them, and his talent is that the gratuity is not slow, boring or unnecessary. These scenes merely feed us the luxury that Almodóvar commits to film.

Volver is his 2006 masterpiece of Spanish cinema, a film universally regarded as his best. For me, it was as if Volver and his more recent Broken Embraces is to Almodóvar that La Dolce Vita and 8½ was to Federico Fellini. He uses the camera to gently and serenely caress his muse, Penélope Cruz, in every shot she is in, but not only that, he loves all women and he regards one and all just as important as his lead. His love of women is evident all over the movie, and not just conventionally beautiful women, but women of all ages, shapes and sizes, none is superior, all are his world.

One shot in particular that stood out for me was one of Cruz cleaning dishes and a huge knife in her kitchen sink. Almodóvar puts the camera right above her for us to see her large cleavage, but does not do it to make the viewer feel bad or dirty, only to show how women are beautiful, or as Richard Roeper said "a celebration of womanhood"!

I'd rather not discuss plot, because this is my view on the film and not a summary, after all; but it is kind of obligatory to give you some idea of what it's about and how it's about it. The film centres around a sisterhood of women in the director's hometown of La Mancha. Two sisters, Raimunda (Cruz) and Sole (Lola Dueñas) now live in Madrid, but occasionally travel back to visit their Aunt Paula, who is senile and going rather insane. She talks to them of the return of their mother Irene (played by Carmen Maura, a veteran actress making her own return). Bizarrely, su Madre does indeed return to them as un phantasma. She is not the conventional ghost at all, getting a perm from Sole, who is a qualified hairdresser, and looking much more elegant than just a white sheet.

Meanwhile, Raimunda's abusive husband is killed by her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) when he tries to rape her. Isn't that the knife we saw earlier? All the women pull together to get rid of the body, and it is very visible that every woman from that region takes death seriously, but also simply in their stride.

The plot is unnecessary, of course. What Volver is about is 'the return', which is indeed the title translation, and the celebration of everything feminine. As a gay man growing up and as a young woman in Spain, Almodóvar and Cruz present these women as their heroines, as they obviously mean so much to them, this is most definitely a fitting tribute to those very women.