Volver
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Volver | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Directed by | Pedro Almodóvar |
| Produced by | Esther García (producer) Augstín Almodóvar (executive) |
| Written by | Pedro Almodóvar |
| Starring | Penélope Cruz Carmen Maura Lola Dueñas Blanca Portillo Yohana Cobo Chus Lampreave |
| Music by | Alberto Iglesias |
| Distributed by | Sony Pictures Classics |
| Running time | 121 minutes |
| Country | Spain |
| Language | Spanish |
| IMDb profile | |
Volver (tr. "Coming Back") is a 2006 Spanish language film by director Pedro Almodóvar. It was one of the films competing for the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. It eventually won two awards: Best Actress (shared by the six main actresses) and Best Screenplay. Its premiere was held on March 10, 2006 in Puertollano, where the filming had taken place.
Contents |
[edit] Synopsis & Plot Details
Thematically, the film centers upon return both in the dead returning and in the form of cycles of re-occurences.
The film opens in a cemetery full of women cleaning and tending to their own and their family gravestones. Two sisters, Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and Sole (Lola Dueñas) and Raimunda's daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) are cleaning the grave of their parents who had died in a tragic fire. The events which had occurred on the night of the fire are only gradually revealed, but are central to the plot of the film.
After their aunt dies, Soledad, returns to the village for the funeral. Agustina (Blanca Portillo), whose mother had disappeared on the night of the fire tells Soledad that she has heard the aunt talking with Soledad's departed mother Irene. Agustina, who has cancer, and is a dear neighbour and friend of the family, helps Sole, who is "terrified of the dead", to avoid seeing the corpse. In her aunt's house, Soledad encounters the ghost of her mother, who had "died in the arms of her husband" in the fire. Arriving home, she hears a knocking sound from the rear of her car, and opens the car and again encounters her mother's ghost. She has brought luggage and intends to stay with Sole for a while.
Soledad, managing to restrain her fright, talks with her departed mother Irene -- while giving her a haircut and dye job in the illegal hair salon she operates in her apartment -- and she tries to find out why she has returned, asking if the she has something she has left undone in her life, causing her to return.
She is told that the mother does have issues to resolve, mainly the reasons why Raimunda hates her and why she is afraid to reveal herself to Raimunda. In the meantime she assists Soledad in shampooing and rinsing customers, posing as a Russian woman who doesn't understand a word of Spanish -- but who can understand gestures extremely well.
Meanwhile Raimunda and her daughter have a different death to cope with. Paula has stabbed her father, Paco, when he attempted to force himself upon her, telling Paula that he "is not her father". Lying dead and bloody on the kitchen floor, the father's corpse is cleaned and wrapped in a blanket, which Raimunda and Paula drag to a nearby -- and fortunately unused -- restaurant. Raimunda, who has been entrusted with the keys to the establishment, in order to help the owner lease it, hides the body in the restaurant's deep freeze. This leads to her meeting someone from a film crew, seeking a place to feed his crew of thirty people. Raimunda strikes a deal to cater for the crew, and finds herself suddenly in the restaurant business.
In a quiet mother-daughter moment with Raimunda, Paula finds out that Paco -- whose corpse still lies hidden in the freezer -- was not in fact her father, and her mother promises to tell her the whole story, not now but "en un otra momenta".
Raimunda gets a phone call from Agustina who asks her if she has seen her mother's ghost. Raimunda has not, but Agustina asks her to find out from her mother -- if she should return -- about Agustina's own mother, who had disappeared on the same day as the tragic fire which had killed Soledad and Raimunda's parents.
That night, Raimunda undertakes the task of disposing of Paco's remains -- renting a van and transporting the freezer to a convenient spot by the river, 180 kilometres away. When she returns, Paula -- who has stayed with Soledad overnight -- has become very close to her departed grandmother. sole reveals to her sister that her mother has shown herself to her, and that she is in fact watching television in the next room with Paula. Raimunda, obviously driven by mixed emotions flees with Paula, but is eventually urged by her daughter to go return to Soledad's apartment and have a talk with her mother.
Raimunda, less credulous than Soledad, asks her mother to tell her the truth -- Is she really alive, and not a dead spirit? Admitting that she was not in fact killed in the fateful fire, Irene reveals everything.
The tragedy that had estranged Raimunda and Irene is that Raimunda's sexually abused by her and fathered a child, Paula, and thus Paula is Raimunda's daughter and also her sister. Raimunda had been angry with her mother for never noticing and stopping this abuse -- which has returned to her life in the form of Paco's attempted rape of Paula. as angry as her mother was with herself when she found out. Irene expains that, when she found out that her husband had abused their daughter, she in fact started the fire that killed him. It had not been Irene, but her husband's mistress who had perished in the fire, and whose ashes are buried in Irene's lovingly tended grave. Because she had been frightened of being caught, Irene had hidden for years in her sister's house, helping to care for her when she began to be unable to look after herself. Taking advantage of the superstitious nature of the community who were accustomed to tales of the dead returning, she had passed herself off as "una fantasma", a ghost.
The film ends with the family reunited and with Irene again acting as a ghostly helper for the dying Agustina, who accepts her as the returned spirit she pretends to be.
Almodóvar says of the story that "it is precisely about death...More than about death itself, the screenplay talks about the rich culture that surrounds death in the region of La Mancha, where I was born. It is about the way (not tragic at all) in which various female characters, of different generations, deal with this culture."[1]
[edit] Critical response
The film got rave reviews when it was released in Spain. Fotogramas, the country's top film magazine, gave it a five-star rating [1]. It also received a standing ovation when it was screened at Cannes Film Festival, and won the Best Screenplay award as well as the award for Best Actress -- which was shared by the six stars of the film.
The film has received a certified fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes, scoring above 90 percent on their "tomatometer".
[edit] Box office
As of June 18, 2006, the film had grossed $12,112,542 at the Spanish Box Office. [2]
[edit] Reference
[edit] External links
- Volver at the Internet Movie Database
- Official Site
- Find the Best Movies - Volver Comment, Rate, View Trailer
- Official Trailer on apple.com
| Pedro Almodóvar |
|---|
|
Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980) • Laberinto de pasiones (1982) • Entre tinieblas (1983) • ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer ésto? (1984) • Matador (1986) • La ley del deseo (1987) • Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988) • ¡Átame! (1990) • Tacones lejanos (1991) • Kika (1993) • La flor de mi secreto (1995) • Carne trémula (1997) • Todo sobre mi madre (1999) • Hable con ella (2002) • La mala educación (2004) • Volver (2006) |
