Click to watch

Trailer for "Volver"

Pedro Almodovar’s Volver begins with a panoramic tracking shot of women tending graves in an old cemetery in a provincial Spanish town. Among them is Raimunda (Penelope Cruz), a very pretty thirtyish woman who is cleaning up around the grave of her parents. Which is appropriate because before the film is over she is going to encounter one of them, a visit from the other side. Sort of.

Volver is about the women in Raimunda’s family, present and past, their relationships and secrets. Most particularly, it’s about parents and female offspring, and their stressed but enduring linkages.

Mothers and daughters have become an Oprah-worthy topic in recent years, but Almodovar’s treatment isn’t the solemn, sentimentally psychologistic approach of the popular media. (And some surprise that is!)

Women have usually been at the core of Almodovar’s work since he broke through into film over a quarter century ago. The males are important but they tend to be more prone to confusion, less consistent in their allegiances, more deflectable from their commitments. In Almodovar’s cinematic universe, women endure.

The Spanish director has primarily been known as a devisor of madcap comic milieus and situations, but there’s usually been a quietly insistent sense of a more serious purpose behind the determinedly dotty, merrily transgressive goings on, and it’s become more prominent in recent years. Bad Education, where the characters were mostly male, was almost devoid of the comic; indeed, it was rather bleakly skeptical. Before that, All About My Mother was informed by a meditative sadness and a guarded hopefulness.

As it happens, there is only one male of any consequence in Volver (which means to come back in Spanish) and he’s disposed of pretty quickly. The women in it are forced to revisit some important unresolved matters from their pasts, matters pushed aside years ago but which are reasserting themselves into their lives after a death in Raimunda’s family. That one is natural but there are three violent demises—one off-camera, one from the women’s family history—whose consequences Almodovar treats a little cavalierly.

This is a trifle disconcerting since doing right by our friends and families is a subtext in his film. There are also a couple of loose narrative threads that he doesn’t tie or snip, but this is unlikely to bother most of his audience.

Volver plays out much of the time near the brink of soap opera parody, but it never actually succumbs to it, never descends to the coldly comic. The film develops inter-generational, neo-gothic involutions, and complications of nearly Greek-tragedy proportions. But it doesn’t abandon its slightly wry, tolerant attitude towards its embattled females.

Volver may strike one as a little inconsistent, but Almodovar remains the master of a piquant storytelling mode that blends sympathy and social dissonance.