'Volver' review Issue #29

By Boris Kachka
Published: September 1st, 2006 | 12:00am

Volver
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film opens with a shot of Spanish housewives frantically sweeping their relatives’ graves, fighting against the wind in the country’s La Mancha region. Some of them, like the gaunt, somber Agustina (Blanca Portillo in a severe crew cut), tend to their own future plots, a twist that neatly showcases three of the Spanish master’s favorite modes: the sinister, the comic, and the picturesque.

Agustina gets less screen time than her wary friends, sisters Sole and Raimunda (Lola Dueñas and Penélope Cruz, who reminds audiences what she’s capable of when in the right hands). Four years prior, their parents died in a fire fueled by those awful La Mancha winds. The film’s title, Volver, means “to return,” and the theme works on many levels, including the possibly supernatural reappearance of Sole and Raimunda’s mother that sets the gears turning. Carmen Maura, a veteran from Almodóvar’s high-art period in the ’80s (Matador and The Law Of Desire), plays the mother, her face newly etched with empathy and comic nuance.

Almodóvar uses the constricted alleyways and expansive inner courtyards of his native region to embody the warm but claustrophobic embrace of the Spanish family, which Raimunda — who lives in Madrid with her daughter and ne’er-do-well husband — has every reason to hold at arm’s length. But both fate and filmmaker have other ideas. People die, lives are shattered and rearranged, and the story swerves across one hairpin turn after another. In his previous movie, Bad Education, Almodóvar inserted noir tropes a bit too insistently, but here he imbues old references with new meaning. The looming white windmills, which the sisters pass on their drives to the village, convey a relentless, hypnotic movement that’s straight out of Hitchcock and bring to mind Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Say what you will about Almodóvar losing his transgressive edge — now he makes great movies that everyone can enjoy.