Dir. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 2006, 120mins, subtitles
Cast: Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Duenas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo, Chus Lampreave, Antonio de la Torre
Review by Richard Dilks
Pedro Almodóvar returns with this passionate and unique feature, starring a ghost, feeling entirely plausible and extracting a terrific central performance from Penélope Cruz. Volver is full of bouncy, fast dialogue and is a (mostly) captivating selection from Almodóvar’s vivid emotional and visual colour palette. The title means ‘coming back’ and the film is composed of returns. This is Almodóvar’s return to Madrid and to La Mancha, the ‘Deep Spain’ where he was a child, and to what he calls “the female world”.
The centre of the film’s female world is Raimunda (Penélope Cruz). With her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) and drunkard husband Paco (Antonio de la Torre), she lives in Madrid – as does her separated sister Sole (Lola Duenas, an Almodóvar alumnus).
The film opens with the sisters going back to La Mancha to visit their senile aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave, returning to work with Almodóvar again), who seems to have things in suspiciously good order.
The film’s only significant male character is Paco, but it’s not long before Almodóvar has dispensed with him and his predictably abusive ways. Killed by his daughter Paula as she resisted his sexual advances, Paco is the male evil removed from the centre of this female world.
The plot is directly imported from Almodóvar’s childhood in the sense that he was brought up by his mother and accompanied her everywhere as there was no one else to look after him. He is again the observer in Volver as the murder is left behind on the searing east wind of La Mancha and by Raimunda’s need to make a living in Madrid.
The plot then takes what in other hands might have been an unappealing lurch. The sisters’ mother Irene (expertly played by Carmen Maura), long since thought to be dead, is reincarnated as a ghost to play her part in the shifting tones of the film’s conclusion.
Maura is another returnee – both in the film and to working with Almodóvar after a gap of seventeen years. She fills the varied role with grace and potency. The six page scene, with six cuts, in which Irene explains all to Raimunda is a masterclass of tonal control.
I was left with a strong impression of the delivery of the unexpected without any sense of trying too hard to surprise the viewer. There is none of the dizzying extremes of character and camerawork which rendered some of Almodóvar’s earlier films pungent but vacuous. In its naturalism, Volver keeps credibility amidst the fantastic.
Novelist Juan José Millás was sent the script. He replied to Almodóvar’s assistant that once Almodóvar has shown us the believeable ghost, “he can do what he wants with the spectator… Volver is a permanent narrative conjuring trick”.
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