| Bilgi :The panoramic shot of women lovingly scrubbing the tombstones of a windswept graveyard -- to the strains of a tuneful operetta song -- sets the tone for an engrossing story set in Spain's La Mancha region, where as it happens death is seamlessly integrated into the daily lives of the living.
"Volver" finds director Pedro Almodovar in masterful form with an engrossing story about devoted mother Raimunda (Penelope Cruz), who covers up the murder of her husband, Paco (Antonio de la Torre), when her teenage daughter, Paula "Yohana Cobo", stabs him in self-defense after he tries to abuse her sexually, having informed her she is not his daughter.
The distraught mother and daughter haul the body to the freezer of a nearby restaurant, for which, conveniently, Raimunda has been entrusted with the keys (shades of Scarlett and Melanie dragging the murdered Union soldier in "Gone With the Wind").
Before long, Raimunda has turned the restaurant into a thriving establishment, after she proves her mettle serving a large on-location film crew. Underneath the melodrama (leavened with some surreal humor) is a perceptive study of women as nurturers -- there are hardly any men present at all -- and all of us cope with the ghosts of the past, the latter symbolized by the otherworldly inclusion of Irene (the great Carmen Maura), Raimunda's deceased mother who, together with her father, died in a mysterious fire many years before. The others include Lola Duenas as Raimunda's hairdresser sister, Sole, to whom Irene's ghost appears, and Blanca Portillo as Augustina, a kindly neighbor with terminal cancer who was helpful to Irene's sister in the woman's declining years, and whose own mother, coincidentally, vanished under mysterious circumstances the same night Irene perished in the blaze.
Almodovar (who also wrote the script that, besides the aforementioned themes, also touches on the vapidity of modern culture) has provided a fabulous showcase for Cruz, who gives a multifaceted performance that tops just about anything she's done on screen. Her performance calls to mind Sophia Loren's towering Oscar-winning mother role in "Two Women," and there are further echoes of that film in Cruz's scenes with young Cobo. |
