Volver
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| Volver | |
|---|---|
 Volver Promotional Poster |
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| 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 L.A. only) 21 December 2006 |
| Running time | 121 min. |
| Country | Spain |
| Language | Spanish |
| Budget | €9,400,000 |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Volver (Spanish: "to return" (specifically: to return to a place), pronounced [bolˈβ̞eɾ]) is a 2006 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.
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[edit] Synopsis
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 neighbour 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 hair 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 speak a word of Spanish -- but who can understand bodily gestures 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.” 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 otro momento” ("another time").
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 three years ago without a trace.
Later on, Raimunda undertakes the task of disposing of Paco’s remains -- leaving Paula with Sole, renting a van and transporting the freezer to a convenient spot by the river Júcar, 180 kilometres away. During this time Paula meets her departed grandmother and grows close to her.
The next night, Agustina comes to visit the restaurant to renew her request to Raimunda to ask her mother’s ghost about her own mother's whereabouts. It is then that she 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 Raimunda’s parents died in the fire.
Sole reveals to Raimunda 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.
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] Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Penélope Cruz | Raimunda |
| Carmen Maura | Irene |
| Lola Dueñas | Soledad (Sole) |
| Blanca Portillo | Agustina |
| Yohana Cobo | Paula |
| Chus Lampreave | Tía Paula |
| Antonio de la Torre | Paco |
| Carlos Blanco | Emilio |
[edit] Critical response
The film received rave reviews when it was released in Spain. Fotogramas, the country's top film magazine, gave it a five-star rating[2]. 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] Top ten lists
The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2006.[3]
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General top ten
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[edit] Awards and nominations
- Academy Awards (0/1):
- Best Actress (Penélope Cruz)
- BAFTA Awards (0/2):
- Best Actress (Penélope Cruz)
- Best Foreign Language Film
- Broadcast Film Critics (0/2):
- Best Actress (Penélope Cruz)
- Best Foreign Language Film
- Chicago Film Critics (0/2):
- Best Actress (Penélope Cruz)
- Best Foreign Language Film
- César Awards (0/1):
- Best Foreign Film
- Empire Awards (1/1):
- Best Actress (Penélope Cruz)
- European Film Awards (4/6):
- Best Actress (Penélope Cruz)
- Best Cinematographer (José Luis Alcaine)
- Best Composer (Alberto Iglesias)
- Best Director (Pedro Almodóvar)
- Best Film
- Best Screenwriter (Pedro Almodóvar)
- Golden Globe Awards (0/2):
- Best Actress - Drama (Penélope Cruz)
- Best Foreign Language Film
- Goya Awards (5/14):
- Best Actress (Penélope Cruz)
- Best Director (Pedro Almodóvar)
- Best Film
- Best Original Score (Alberto Iglesias)
- Best Supporting Actress (Carmen Maura)
- Best Cinematography (José Luis Alcaine)
- Best Costume Design (Sabine Daigeler)
- Best Make-Up and Hairstyles (Massimo Gattabrusi and Ana Lozano)
- Best Production Design (Salvador Parra)
- Best Production Supervision (Toni Novella)
- Best Screenplay - Original (Pedro Almodóvar)
- Best Sound
- Best Supporting Actress (Lola Dueñas)
- Best Supporting Actress (Blanca Portillo)
- National Board of Review (1/1):
- Best Foreign Language Film
- Satellite Awards (1/4):
- Best Foreign Language Film
- Best Actress - Drama (Penélope Cruz)
- Best Director (Pedro Almodóvar)
- Best Screenplay - Original (Pedro Almodóvar)
- Screen Actors Guild (SAG) (0/1):
- Best Actress (Penélope Cruz)
- Vancouver Film Critics (1/1):
- Best Foreign Language Film
[edit] Box office
In the US alone, as of May 9, 2007, the film had made $12,897,993 (15.4% of total) in the box office, after 26.4 weeks of release in 689 theatres. The box office figure from the rest of the world is somewhere in the region of $71,123,059 (84.6% of total) according to the results of 'BoxOfficeMojo'. The total worldwide gross was estimated at $84,021,052. [4]
As of January 22, 2007, the film had grossed $12,241,181 at the Spanish Box Office. [5]
[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 Penélope Cruz.
The dance tune playing at the party prior to Raimunda's lip syncing is called "A good thing" by English three-piece indie-dance combo Saint Etienne.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Volver at the Internet Movie Database
- Volver at Rotten Tomatoes
- Volver Reviews at Metacritic
- Official Site
- Official Trailer on apple.com
- Volver Production Notes
| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by La Vida Secreta de las Palabras |
Goya Award for Best Picture 2007 |
Succeeded by La Soledad |
| Preceded by The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada |
Cannes Film Festival Prix du scénario 2006 |
Succeeded by The Edge of Heaven |
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