Flak Magazine: Review of Volver, 12-13-06

It can't be easy being Pedro Almodóvar. As Spain's most visible and exportable director, the latest "Almodóvar" (it's no longer even necessary to call it the latest Almodóvar film, you'll note) is awaited with the kind of anticipation some reserve for the next Harry Potter installment or Bond flick. Since the director's breakthrough 1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, moviegoers have come to expect camp, and lots of it, in an Almodóvar, replete with pregnant nuns, transsexual streetwalkers, comatose ballerinas, frenetic drug use, and extremely intense eye shadow, just to name a few of the more crucial elements.

But the Almodóvar of the 21st Century has become somewhat more reflective and, in his latest film, Volver, has struck a quiet, familiar tone unseen in previous works. His trademark kitsch hasn't disappeared entirely, but it's meted out sparingly, and takes a secondary role to the director's exploration of family, Spain and the past. Volver, which literally means "to return" (and unlike every other Spanish-language film released in the United States has, happily, not been translated into English for wide release), is a brilliant passage through Almodóvar's own personal and professional past, marking the movie as something of a homecoming for a director who never actually left.

The film opens in La Mancha, where a gaggle of widows busily scrub their husbands' tombstones, the kind of scene that Almodóvar manipulates so well: it is at first comical, all those squat blue-haired ladies contentedly gathered in a cemetery as if it were a festive tea party. But a second look reveals a world in which life and death intermingle easily, and men are silent bystanders, if not predators. We're also reminded of another famous Spanish story that takes place somewhere in La Mancha, the literary allusion brought home by the shots of windmills dotting the central Spanish plains. It stands to reason that either Almodóvar has positioned himself as Spain's modern-day cinematic Cervantes or he has an unusual interest in Spain's dependence on wind power.

Volver is the story of a family of women, connected by their need to live outside the world of men and by the secrets that begin to intertwine their histories. Springboarding from a premise done arguably to perfection in Federico García Lorca's play "The House of Bernarda Alba" (which is implicitly referred to here; Almodóvar is nothing if not an attentive reader of his native literary canon), Almodóvar transforms the story into a commentary on modern-day Spain and the many faces of Spanish women. Penelope Cruz as Raimunda tackles the role of headstrong housewife, but as one begins to understand the broken shards behind her outward bravado, Cruz lends a nuance to the role that's unexpected, especially if you're only familiar with her from her Stateside acting. Cruz is a much better actress in Spanish, much like that other former member of Almodóvar's gang doomed to appear in every sequel to Spy Kids.

Beyond a first-rate cast, Almodóvar — who, as usual, wrote the screenplay, and has a wry sense of dialogue — finds a way to make a somewhat farcical murder/ghost story into riveting cinema. Raimunda, her sister and her daughter return to the small town of their birth, where they are greeted by a senile old aunt, a pot-smoking spinster neighbor, and the ghost of their mother, who hitches a ride back to Madrid in the trunk of Raimunda's sister's car. The death of Raimunda's aunt begins a series of interlocking revelations that turn a movie that starts as magic realism into a movie that ends as drama, all the while maintaining a sense of humor about the divisions and setbacks facing any family, much less a dysfunctional Spanish one. Any film that pauses for a mother-daughter conversation about the size of Penelope Cruz's breasts is clearly trying not to take itself too seriously.

But Volver is also a movie that touches on some of the more prevalent issues facing Spain today — spousal and child abuse, the transformation of Spanish pueblos into ghost towns for senior citizens, the illegal enterprises mounted by a growing lower — and often, but not always, immigrant — class in order to scrape by in the urban center. Although Spanish cinema as a whole has been exploring these more serious and relevant themes in recent years, Almodóvar left behind the problems of the Spanish masses back in 1984 with What Have I Done to Deserve This?. Here, the idea of returning extends to so many things: a return to his earlier, less wacky, work; a return to the actress Carmen Maura, who was considered his muse until the 1990s, in the role of Raimunda's mother; a return to his own and Spain's past, setting part of the movie in the small town of Almagro, Almodóvar's birthplace and the symbolic center of Spain's Golden Age of literature.

If anything, Volver may dig too deeply into this idea of a return, patching together so many elements of the past as to make the film disjointed in places. But when the only thing you can find to complain about is that a gorgeous scene of a paper towel mopping up fresh blood is a little too self-consciously like Psycho you are, indeed, tilting at windmills. The truth of the matter is that Volver combines Almodóvar's consistently beautiful aesthetic with a compelling story and a standout cast. That it inaugurates a new era in Almodóvar's work only makes the viewer eager and expectant for more of the same: and luckily, Almodóvar always seems to deliver.

— Sara J. Brenneis (sara at flakmag dot com)