Volver
(Various cinemas)
For the past twenty years Pedro Almodóvar has used the designer Juan Gatti to title his films. A cross between the gritty, vivid work Saul Bass did for Vertigo and Psycho and the cartoon camp of Blake Edwards’s Pink Panther films, Gatti’s credits announce a hyper-real world of dramatic intensity and black farce, heightened colour and extreme emotion. The titles of Almodóvar’s last film, Bad Education, with their mixture of dark religious imagery and obscene graffiti, signalled a world of oppression and abuse. Volver, by contrast, opens with flowers and patterns abstracted from the clothes of the working-class Spanish women who are the focus of the film. One of the many returns of the title (“volver” means “to come back”) is thereby declared: Almodóvar has, after two uneasy films about men, returned with palpable relief to the world of women. He has said of it: “This film is my deepest return to my origins . . . I was brought up by women, the men whom I practically never saw being in the fields”. It is also a geographical return to his native La Mancha, and to the mores and rituals of village life.
The opening scene is one of vigorous feminine labour, a group of unsentimental Spanish village women cleaning, brushing and polishing. The objects of their domestic attentions are graves, setting the tone for a film in which women and women’s work are portrayed as imperturbable forces, dealing even-handedly with the comedies and tragedies of life and death. As the camera pans across the busy, windy graveyard, the title slides into place on a tombstone. We are, it seems, beginning a ghost story. But first, murder. Tending the grave of their mother are Raimunda (Penelope Cruz), her sister Sole (Lola Deunas) and Raimunda’s fourteen-year- old daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo). After briefly tending to her senile aunt, who insists that she is being looked after by her dead sister, Raimunda and her daughter return to their run-down Madrid apartment and to Raimunda’s husband. In the course of his brief screen life, he announces that he has been fired, gets drunk, leers at his daughter, masturbates while his wife weeps, and is killed by the daughter as she defends herself against attempted rape. Raimunda, coming home from work, finds the body in the kitchen and decides to hide it to protect Paula. It should be melodrama. The scenario is straight from Mildred Pierce and, as the camera patiently follows Raimunda cleaning up the kitchen, we are reminded of the long sequence of Norman Bates cleaning up the shower room in Psycho. But Almodóvar plays it with quotidian domesticity. We watch a kitchen towel absorb the blood, and are reminded of commercials on afternoon television; the knife is washed in a basin full of the day’s dishes. The moving, concealing and disposing of the corpse, one of the main narrative strands of the film, is another piece of women’s work, done with the same equanimity, the same neighbourly co-operation, humour and brio with which Raimunda takes over and runs the local café. The fact that there is a corpse in the freezer is neither played on as a gruesome secret, nor milked for tension.
As the murder is free of melodrama, so the revenant holds no terror. The dead mother of Raimunda and Sole (played by Carmen Maura, returning to work with Almodóvar after an absence of seventeen years) appears first only to Sole, who offers her a job helping out in her illegal hair-dressing salon. To hide her identity, she poses as a mute Russian and scampers under the bed whenever Raimunda appears. The two did not part on good terms. What sounds surreal comes across as gentle comedy. The principal actresses shared an award at Cannes this year and deservedly so. They act with natural tenderness and humour, so that for the duration of the film we seem to inhabit a place where the distinction between the living and the dead is not so important.
The reconciliation of Raimunda with her mother and their confrontation with the past form the emotional heart of the film. It would be an injustice to reveal it, although Volver does not rely on mystery to sustain our interest. Rather, it provides an intensely compelling, rich and mythic vision of women. Penelope Cruz, in particular, is remarkable, evoking the presence and look of Anna Magnani or Sophia Loren, their combination of earthiness and fire. And the film is full of colour, full of images of food and drink, their preparation, sharing and consumption; full of the textures and patterns, music and rhythms that enrich the home. This is the world of women as sensual nourishment – Almodóvar has even described it as a return to the maternal breast – where women weave the social matrix, while men are either absent or are trying to disrupt it for their own ends. But even this violence is woven back into the fabric of society, to be contained by the hands of women. Volver presents, of course, a highly romanticized and questionable vision of femininity – but it makes for a beautiful place in which to spend two hours.
