A Good Watch
Movie reviewer, Dr.
Johanna Schmertz
Dr.
Schmertz is an Associate Professor of English at
the University of Houston-Downtown, where she teaches writing and film
studies. Her articles have appeared in Pedagogy,
Postscript, Rhetoric Review and Reader.
Volver
Volver is written and directed by Pedro Almodovar, Spain's most famous and prolific director (All About My Mother, Bad Education, Tie Me
Up/Tie Me Down, The Law of Desire, What Have I Done to Deserve This, Women
on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). It is a dark, charming
comedy featuring five leading Spanish actresses, including
Penelope Cruz as the resourceful Raimunda. Volver focuses on a family of women and how secrets
from the past determine their current relationships with one another. Raimunda's mother (Almodovar
veteran Carmen Mauro) is dead, yet she appears daily to village
inhabitants and, gradually, to all her family members except Raimunda. Over the course of the movie, various puzzle
pieces of family history appear, and we learn why Raimunda
is the only one who can't see her dead mother.
Volver means
to return. The title
refers to the way the past returns in the present - not just for the film's central characters but for Almodovar himself. The movie is set partly in Almodovar's native village of La Mancha,
a beautiful old, windy town haunted by ghosts and traditions. In his
production diary, published in IndieWIRE, Almodóvar says that the story of Volver
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." (http://www.indiewire.com/ots/2006/05/cannes_06_daily_1.html)
With Almodovar's
trademark use of vibrant color, location shooting, dark humor and
strong female comedic actresses, Volver has won both popular and
critical acclaim. At the Cannes Film Festival it was screened to standing
ovations, and won the Best Screenplay award as well as the award for Best
Actress - which
was shared by the five
female stars of the film. In addition, the film received two
nominations at the 2006 Golden Globes: Best Actress for Penelope Cruz and
Best Foreign Language Film.
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