untitled
VOLVER
Written & Directed by: Pedro
Almodóvar
Internet
Movie
Database Entry for full details
GRADE: A
2006.
Not very far into Volver,
Raimunda (Penelope Cruz), is standing over a dead body in her kitchen
when a knock comes on the front door. It’s her landlord, and he
notices a bit of blood on her neck. “Are you hurt?” he asks
and, without missing a beat, she replies, “No. It’s
women’s troubles.” Women's Troubles, were it not so euphemistically uncouth, would've been an excellent alternate title for Volver;
hardly a man appears in it, and when one does, like Cruz's husband Paco
(Antonio de la Torre)—who is introduced by a POV shot of his
teenage daughter's crotch—it's only to cause trouble.
For women.
Raimunda hides the aforementioned body inside of a freezer in her
landlord's neighboring, boarded-up restaurant, which she then decides
to, without permission, open up and manage herself. Meanwhile, her
sister, Soledad (Lola Dueñas), moves-in with their mother, Irene
(Carmen Maura), who incidentally died four years prior (!?), and an old
neighbor (Blanca Portillo) from the sisters' hometown is looking for
answers to her own mother's mysterious disappearance, which also
occurred four years earlier. Like any old melodrama, these plot lines
all intersect with heated results, but Almodóvar takes them
places Douglas Sirk would never have dared dream, lest the MPAA have
shipped him back to Germany. Volver might arguably be a
generic "woman's picture", but in its proud portrayal of feministic
independence and its frank tackling of taboo subjects it's
distinctively modern (there isn't even a standard romantic subplot), an
aughties soap opera of sorts, grounded in the doughty performances of
its leading ladies. It's a portrait of women more than just emotionally
strong—when a refrigerator needs to be moved, it's a pack of
women who do it, no muscle-bound men required; and if they don't even
need a man to move heavy machinery, what else would they need one for?
Almodóvar's deep and genuine appreciation for women applies to
not just their fortitude and derring-do but to their physical beauty as
well—and, well, why not? Penelope Cruz has never looked lovlier,
but neither has she ever acted better or had a more complex and
admirable character to take on. As a contrast, however, the few men who
appear as characters in the story aren't particularly appealing,
sexually or otherwise: Paco's venereal violence, as exhibited when
cruelly masturbating in bed beside a tearful Raimunda or while shooting
salacious gazes at his daughter, is abhorrently frightening, while
Cruz's father—already dead when the action begins, having died in
a fire with his wife—is revealed to have been a philanderer...and
worse, the sort of fellow you could imagine sharing a circle of Hell
with John Huston's character from Chinatown. He was "born to
hurt the women who loved him," according to Irene's ghost—to put
it mildly—and it's a description that neatly fits Paco as well.
(The only man who comes off well is the production manager of a film
crew shooting nearby, a marginal character notable only for his sex,
who everyday orders lunch for the cast and crew at Cruz’s
restaurant. He’s nice enough, I guess, particularly in relation
to Paco, who we see watching his topless daughter furtively and
lasciviously through her narrowly opened bedroom door.)
Fires blaze in past and present while ominous easterlies blow-in
(having a sort of full-moon effect on the characters' sanities),
foreshadowing the arrival of Irene's ghost, the return of the
repressed. Meanwhile, the screen is awash in deep red, as though
barrels of blood and Cabernet were tossed around the sets and wardrobe
to illustrate the fiery, flaring and stirring repressions that infect
every character and their relationships to one another. (Almodovar,
when developing Irene, Sole and Raimunda, might have had Ezekiel 19:12
on his mind: "[the tree] was uprooted in burning wrath, and made low on
the earth; the east wind came, drying her up, and her branches were
broken off; her strong rod became dry, the fire made a meal of it." A
masculine God would allow such a thing to happen to a feminine tree!) Volver,
as its title implies—it's the unconjugated Spanish verb for
“return”—is about reappearances, repetitions, and
do-overs; about revisiting the unresolved wrongs of the past, as buried
sins are exhumed in the present, resurfacing in new yet familiar
shapes. Volver opens with Cruz and Soledad cleaning-off their mother's tombstone, but some things can't just be brushed away.
Yet Volver thankfully eschews easy histrionics in favor of
something more difficult—subtle though colorful drama.
Almodóvar, like the smell of paperback books, is just getting
better with age; with Volver, he has finally mastered the melodrama, a triumph he’s been striving after for, arguably, his entire career. Volver
is both artificial and credible, and Cruz owns it with her surprising
virtuosity, breathlessly portraying an exasperated, put-upon, yet
resilient woman with a string of misfortunes too terrible to be true,
were it not for her dramatic believability. For all its barbarity,
though, for its cynical portrait of an evil world, Volver
says it's never too late to undo the wrongs of the past, to make the
world right again. Talk about a lot of gorgeous,
heart-warming/tear-jerking phony baloney. It's marvelous.
--
Henry Stewart
Post a
comment/reply on our Discussion Board
-------
© 2007
Send Us an Email
Cinepinion Home
The
Cinepinion Archives
bravenet.com