Volver

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Volver

Directed by	Pedro Almodóvar
Produced by	Esther García (producer) Agustín Almodóvar (executive)
Written by	Pedro Almodóvar
Starring	Penélope Cruz Carmen Maura Lola Dueñas Blanca Portillo Yohana Cobo Chus Lampreave
Music by	Alberto Iglesias
Cinematography	Jose Luis Alcaine
Editing by	José Salcedo
Distributed by	Sony Pictures Classics
Release date(s)	March 17, 2006 25 August 2006 3 October 2006 (NYC and LA only) 21 December 2006
Running time	121 min.
Country	Spain
Language	Spanish
Budget	$ 9,400,000
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Volver (Spanish: "to return" (specifically: to return to a place), (IPA pronunciation: [bol'bɛɾ])) is a 2006 Academy Award-nominated Spanish film by director Pedro Almodóvar.

Volver 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. The film's premiere was held on March 10, 2006, in Puertollano, Spain, where the filming had taken place.

1 Synopsis
2 Critical response
3 Box office
4 Music
5 Reference
6 External links

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Thematically, the film centers upon return, both in the dead returning and in the form of cycles of re-occurrences.

The film opens in a cemetery full of women cleaning and tending to their families' 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 Paula dies, Sole returns to the village for the funeral. Agustina (Blanca Portillo), Aunt Paula’s neighbor whose mother had disappeared without a trace three years ago, tells Sole that she has heard the aunt talking with Sole's departed mother, Irene. Agustina helps Sole, who is “terrified of the dead”, to avoid seeing the corpse at the funeral. In her aunt’s house, Sole 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.

Sole, managing to restrain her fright, talks with her departed mother Irene -- while giving her a haircut and dye job in the hair salon she operates in her apartment -- and she tries to find out why she has returned, asking if 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; it is later revealed that these issues revolve around the reasons why Raimunda hates her and why she is afraid to reveal herself to Raimunda. In the meantime, she assists Sole 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, Paco’s corpse is cleaned and wrapped in a blanket, which Raimunda and Paula drag to a nearby 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. Raimunda promises to tell her the whole story, not now but “en un otro momento”.

Raimunda gets a phone call from Agustina, who tells Raimunda that she is in the city because she has gone to the hospital. Agustina has just learned that she has cancer and wants Raimunda to come visit her. Raimunda protests that she is busy, but eventually makes the trip to the hospital. While she is there, Agustina 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 the fate of Agustina's own mother, who had disappeared two years ago without a trace.

One night, while Raimunda is hosting the wrap party for the film crew that she has been catering for, Agustina comes to visit the restaurant. While she is there, she renews her request to Raimunda to ask her mother’s ghost about her own mother's whereabouts. It is then that reveals two startling secrets: that Raimunda's father and Agustina’s mother were having an affair and that Agustina's mother disappeared on the same day as the fire that killed Raimunda’s parents.

Later on, 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 Sole 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 Sole, 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.

In a revealing conversation between Raimunda and her mother, we learn that the reason for their estrangement is that Raimunda was sexually abused and impregnated by her father, giving birth to Paula; thus, Paula is Raimunda’s daughter and also her sister. Raimunda had been angry with her mother for never noticing and ending this abuse. Irene tells Raimunda that she was angry with herself when she found out. Irene explains that, between her husband’s affair with Agustina’s mother and his abuse of Raimunda, she had started the fire that had killed him. The ashes that had been presumed to be Irene’s were, in fact, the ashes of Agustina's mother. 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 lost the ability 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 rare sightings of herself off as “un fantasma”, a ghost.

The film ends with the family reunited at Aunt Paula’s house. Irene reveals her presence to Agustina, who believes Irene to be a ghost, and cares for her as her condition worsens-- saying to Raimunda that it was the least that she could do after killing Agustina's mother.

Spoilers end here.

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 as part of the official selection at the 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. In addition, the film received two nominations at the 2006 Golden Globes: Best Actress for Penélope Cruz as well as Best Foreign Language Film. Cruz also received Academy Award, BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations for Best Actress.

The film has received a Certified Fresh rating from critics at Rotten Tomatoes, scoring 91% on the site's "Tomatometer", as well as 91% from the users on the site.

[edit] Box office

In the US alone, as of April 5, 2007, the film had made $12,853,366 (15.3% of total) in the box office, after 22 weeks of release. The box office figure from the rest of the world is somewhere in the region of $70,929,137 (84.7% of total) according to the results of 'BoxOfficeMojo'. The total worldwide gross was estimated at $83,782,503. [2]

As of January 22, 2007, the film had grossed $12,241,181 at the Spanish Box Office. [3]

[edit] Music

Tango by Carlos Gardel Volver is converted to flamenco and is sung in the movie with the voice of Estrella Morente and (lip synced by Penelope Cruz).