Nathan’s Movie Collection: Volver (2006)
“Don't say that, Raimunda, or I'll start crying. And ghosts don't cry.”
Note: Most of these movies have been around for a considerable amount of time, so assume there will be spoilers all throughout. Also, as a warning, there is some discussion of domestic violence and sexual assault.
I was a little busy this month so both entries into Nathan’s Movie Collection this month were delayed. I’ll have something about Nacho Libre in a couple days, but today I’m talking the Pedro Almodóvar movie Volver.
Four or five years ago, I decided to finally cross Pedro Almodóvar off my watchlist, so I picked up the two movies of his that my library had available: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and All About My Mother. Anyone familiar with Almodóvar’s work knows I couldn’t have picked two more different movies for a double feature. After watching both of them over an afternoon, I was able to also get Talk to Her, Broken Embraces, and Julieta from the library and slowly start getting a better sense of what an Almodóvar movie is and how that has evolved over an almost fifty-year career.
What I love about Almodóvar is the same thing I love about the Coen Brothers. His movies are full of stories and ideas that don’t seem like they would work together and by the end, he’s dovetailed all threads of the story into something truly incredible. Also like the Coens, his movies have so much happening in the margins that if you watch them two or three times, you’ll notice things you didn’t see on the first watch. They’ve both also worked with the great Javier Bardem.
Almodóvar came out of La Movida Madrileña, a punk rock scene that came out of Madrid after the death of Francisco Franco. Spain was experiencing economic growth and an explosion of artistic freedom after being under a dictatorship. “It was as though Franco never existed,” Almodóvar said while he was promoting Parallel Mothers, his most recent movie. “We just sort of moved forward as if it hadn’t happened. That was my way of embracing democracy and turning my back on the Franco years.” His early movies in particular really reflect this, being especially confrontational and transgressive. While I don’t think his movies haven’t gotten less transgressive over the years, his explorations of desire and obsession in the early days were a lot messier in ways that don’t hold up in the cold light of 2023.
That being said, like any established filmmaker with an extensive catalogue of work, it’s fun to watch the early movies and see them cutting their teeth and developing their skills. If you want to see some wild John Waters-esque hijinks, there’s a bunch of them right now on Prime Video and MUBI, which is like arthouse Netflix. This isn’t a paid advertisement for MUBI, but I’ll take the money if they’re offering.
But about Volver. It’s probably Almodóvar’s most celebrated movie, in terms of awards, with good reason and it’s the one I’m the most moved by in really unexpected ways. The movie begins with Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and Sole (Lola Dueñas), two sisters living in Madrid, travelling back to the small village they grew up in to visit their dementia-stricken aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave), who’s being cared for her neighbor Augustina (Blanca Portillo) who’s dealing herself with a terminal cancer diagnosis.
By the end of the first act, Aunt Paula has passed and Raimunda’s daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) has stabbed her father to death after he tried to force himself onto her, claiming he’s not actually her father. Raimunda hides the body in the freezer of a restaurant she’s tending while the owner’s out. Meanwhile, Sole goes back to Madrid for Paula’s funeral where she finds out from that Aunt Paula was talking to the ghost of Irene (Carmen Maura), Raimunda and Sole’s mother. That’s when Irene makes her presence known to Sole.
Sole tries to hide her mother by disguising her as a Russian immigrant. When Raimunda comes over to the house, forcing Irene to hide under the bed, she’s almost given away when she starts farting. Raimunda doing a double take and recognizing her mom’s fart smell is one of the greatest scenes in an Almodóvar movie, maybe cinema as a whole. On its face, it’s a completely unnecessary display of low-brow humor (of which I am a fan), but Almodóvar turns into a funny, tender moment between siblings. I mean, who among us couldn’t pick our parents’ farts out of a lineup?
Eventually, Raimunda meets with her mother and finds out she’s not actually a ghost; Irene went into hiding after down the house where Raimunda’s father and his lover were sleeping. Because people believed her to have died in the fire, Irene was able to roam the town as a ghost. This comes from Almodóvar tapping into the culture of death in the region of La Mancha, which is where this small village is at. “That’s the good thing about such superstitious places,” Irene tells Raimunda during their climactic scene together. “It was easier for me to go along with them then to speak the truth.”
I liked Volver well enough the first time I watched it but the second time around Raimunda and Irene’s conversation toward the end on the park bench hit me like a ton of bricks. At that point, we’re given two reveals: 1) Irene burned the house down because she found out that Raimunda was assaulted and impregnated by her father, making him the father of Paula and 2) The woman her husband was sleeping with was Augustina’s mother. The genius of Almodóvar is taking this soapy storyline and turning it into something emotionally poignant. It isn’t the transgressive story that gets me as much as watching two hurt and broken people finally start to heal. At his best, Almodóvar takes characters, mostly women, that in any other story would be scorned, ridiculed, or made an example of and takes their stories seriously.
Volver is a murderer’s row (heh) of the best Almodóvar collaborators. All of the women in the main cast (Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo and Chus Lampreave) were collectively nominated for and won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival that year. This movie was also a reunion between Almodóvar and Carmen Maura, with whom he’d had a falling out during the production of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Irene is such a lovely character but watching her having to hide under a bed, get stuffed in a trunk, and fart feels like the hatchet being very slowly lowered into the ground.
Penélope Cruz’s performance earned her an Oscar for Best Actress, making her the first (and only, to date) Spanish actress to win the award. It’s a wonderful perfomance that gets better each time I watch the movie, but the true miracle is watch Penélope Cruz very obviously lip-synching through a flamenco song and it’s still amazing. I don’t have anything else to add to this so I’ll close out this entry with a clip of that performance.