WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

Volver

(Transcript)
Originally broadcast November 22, 2006

	Milos Stehlik

Listen to Milos Stehlik's Commentary

Volver, the new film by Almodovar, is being marketed as his breakthrough film to a wider audience, mostly on the strength of Penelope Cruz, who plays the main role of Raimunda. I wish him well. Volver is Almodovar-lite, but it is also a film from an older, more accepting, less contentious Almodovar. In a way, Volver feels nostalgic, both for the women in his life and for his native province of Castile-La Mancha.

What defined Almodovar as a filmmaker was his fearlessness in taking on themes which were both subversive and anarchic. He is a self-taught filmmaker who paid his dues working low-level jobs at the phone company for twelve years, until he earned enough to buy his first Super 8 mm camera.

His first feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Woman on the Heap was made for about $20,000. With money from the film’s success, Almodovar founded his own production company with his brother Augustin, and went on to create a body of work which is singular in Spanish and world cinema—films like Law of Desire, What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Dark Habits, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Live Flesh, Matador, Kika, The Flower of My Secret and more recently, Bad Education, All About My Mother and Talk to Her.

At the heart of Almodovar’s films is a fine sense of melodrama—the idea that larger-than-life characters live larger-than-we-expect lives. The obstacles in their way to happiness are the taboos of modern, and in some ways specifically Spanish Catholic society—the church and its constraints and hypocrisies, the rules imposed by gender, marital status or profession and, in particular unresolved secrets in the past.

Almodovar’s tries to turn these social taboos on their head. His very human and often lovable characters often act from the edge of desperation. They are driven to actions which, for most people, would only exist in bizarre fantasies. Almodovar’s gift is to make the bizarre real and authentic, to “normalize it” so that we embrace it.

The girl’s mother in High Heels returns after 15 years to find her daughter married to one of her mother’s former lovers. The ex-matador and a woman lawyer in Matador are turned on by killing while a young man goes crazy as a result of his religious upbringing. In Talk to Her, one of Almodovar’s most moving films, one of the main characters is a male nurse who obsessively dedicates his life to caring for a young ballet dancer in a coma.

In Volver, the obsessive Raimunda cleans off headstores in a graveyard, and is deserted by her husband shortly after he makes sexual advances to her daughter. Then the plot veers off in totally unexpected directions as Raimunda’s mother shows up back from the dead to help her dying sister, all of which leads to murder, a body that must first be hidden away and then secretly buried, and a deep, dark family secret underneath it all.

Plausability is not something that particularly interests Almodovar in any of his films, and certainly not in Volver. Plot strands are there to be followed, wherever they may lead. Almodovar’s films work by association—a kind of mild surrealism which he has made into his own cinematic language.

At the heart of Volver is the family—an institution as necessary to life as breathing. In Volver, this institution is seen from the perspective of women—a marvelous ensemble of Almodovar regulars who, besides Cruz, includes Carmen Maura, Lola Duenas, Blanca Portillo and Yohana Cobo. The love that binds families together also tears them apart. Families both empower individuals and condemn them to suffer, force them into lives which go off track because of buried family secrets.

An inevitable sense of destiny drives Volver. Here is a more serious Almodovar— with fewer jokes, less willing to poke fun at family icons. The farcical elements are there, but they are more muted, because this is a more emotional Almodovar.

The title Volver refers to its translation as “coming back”. The mother returns to the family as a ghost with unfinished business. The past and the present are often parallel and intermingle with each other. Carmen Maura, the great star of earlier Almodovar films, returns to an Almodovar film after a 17-year break with her director.

If you see Volver, you should follow it up with your own comeback: the earlier films of Almodovar.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

“Worldview” film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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