Raimunda is a working wife and mum holding down several jobs to support her adolescent daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo). The story is at once hysterical and mundane, founded in abuse, rape, murder and corpse disposal yet ultimately about none of these so much as the endurance of those involved. Housework here is murder and a woman's work is never done - not after killing, not even after dying. In one of the most gorgeous images in 'Volver', white blossoms into crimson as a sheet of kitchen towel saturates with blood. Would anyone now doubt that the director is a great painter-dramatist at work?Īnthony Quinn, The Independent, 25 August 2006 (Extract)
The chiaroscuro of funeral black alongside pale faces has the delicacy of that Velazquez picture of the old woman with her eggs. How else to describe the film's opening scene, which is set in a village cemetery in La Mancha, where women of all ages lovingly polish the marble gravestones of their dearly departed, while a fierce wind swirls all about them? Here, Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) and her adolescent daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) meet their old friend Agustina (Blanca Portillo) and chat quite merrily about the dead, then plant lip-smacking kisses upon one another in farewell. Indeed, if there's a better byword for tragicomic than "Almodovarean" I don't know it. All of these elements are celebrated, in his eccentric and characteristically perverse way, throughout his latest project, Volver, a comedy melodrama that juggles with moods so freely you that you can hardly tell if it's up or down, funny or sad. Like Cukor, he revels in their resourcefulness, their generosity, their long-suffering patience and, perhaps above all, their protective talent for masquerade. In the last 10 years, Pedro Almodovar has become, among much else, the greatest director of women since George Cukor.