When I was in middle school, a movie called Volver came out. I was really intrigued by the poster of Penelope Cruz surrounded by these very colorful red flowers, with this troubled expression on her face as she looks to the side of her. It just seemed like such a mature movie to me, but I don't think I would have been able to appreciate the film if I had seen it back then because it does have a lot of mature themes. I am glad I finally saw it now after so many years of wanting to see it because it really was an excellent film. I had seen Pedro Almodóvar's other movie Julieta, which came out a decade after Volver did. That movie was really good, too.
The movie Volver takes place in Spain, and it opens with several women cleaning off the caskets of deceased loved ones. Penelope Cruz plays Raimunda, a woman who is grappling with the loss of her parents. Her sister is named Sole (Lola Duenas) and Raimunda also has a daughter named Paula (Yohana Cobo). They go over to their aunt Paula's house, where Aunt Paula takes care of herself. Sole finds her mother's old bicycle in Paula's attic and starts to wonder more about her mother. Meanwhile, Raimunda has to deal with another issue: her husband, Paco, lost his job. We also find out Paco is a shady dude because Raimunda's daughter is sitting on the couch, Paco looks at her crotch. He also walks past her room and finds her naked and starts looking at her in a creepy way. Raimunda is stressed because Paco isn't doing anything to find a new job; he is just sitting and drinking beer and watching sports, while she has to take on several jobs to make ends meet. When Paco wants to have sex, Raimunda refuses and he masturbates instead. When Raimunda gets off the bus to walk home, she finds her daughter waiting for her at the bus stop. When she asks where Dad is, Paula says he is at home and she also looks very shaken. They arrive home to find Paco dead with a knife in his body and blood pooling around him. Paula tells her mom that Paco tried to rape her and so she stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife. Raimunda, shaken that Paco would do such a thing, cleans up the blood and plans to dispose of Paco's body. She also takes the blame for what Paula did and decides to not tell anyone about what happened to Paco. Emilio comes to the house and tells Raimunda that he is going out of town and needs someone to run his restaurant in his absence, and he gives her the keys to the restaurant. The next day, Raimunda takes Paco's body and puts it in the freezer in the back storage room. The person in charge of a film crew comes to the restaurant and tells her they want to eat at the restaurant while they are shooting a movie. At first, Raimunda is reluctant to do so, but he offers to pay her well, so she lets him and the crew eat at the restaurant. Aunt Paula passes away and Sole and Agustina are grieving her death. Raimunda continues to run the restaurant and asks some women around the neighborhood, including Regina and Ines, if they could lend her some food (pork and cookies) to the restaurant for her to prepare for the film crew. They help her out and honestly seeing the menu of what she was serving in that restaurant sounded delicious even though I'm a vegan. I have never tried meat from Spain but I bet it's delicious. Meanwhile, Soledad is driving and she parks her car outside her house, and she hears a woman whisper her name. When she opens the trunk she finds the woman is none other than her mother, Irene, the lady she thought was dead for years. Sole lets her mother stay with her, and her mother reveals that her husband cheated on her when they were married. Sole is divorced and doesn't live with anyone, so her mother says they can live together. However, Sole decides to hide her mother from Raimunda so that Raimunda doesn't know that her mother is alive, and Sole has a bunch of women come to her home so she can do their hair, and she has Irene pretend to be from Russia and not understand Spanish so they don't know it's her. When she is at the restaurant, Paula (Raimunda's daughter) goes into the freezer and gets suspicious about what Raimunda is hiding in there, and when she asks about it, Raimunda tells her that no one is to look in that freezer, not even Paula. When Paula asks if Paco is her real dad, Raimunda tells her that Paco is not her biological dad and that her biological dad passed away a long time ago. The film crew has their final celebration at the restaurant and Raimunda finds a group of guitarists playing, and she decides to go out and sing for everyone. Soledad pulls up to outside the restaurant with Irene hiding in the car and Irene overhears Raimunda singing this beautiful song that her grandmother sung to her a long time ago called "Volver" by Carlos Gardel (which I finally realized is the significance of the movie's title), and she is moved to tears. The next day Raimunda calls to rent a van to put Paco's corpse in, and Emilio calls her to asks about how the restaurant is going and Raimunda confesses that she has taken over the restaurant. Emilio is disappointed because no one told him about this, but Raimunda has another big problem to deal with, not only how to get rid of her ex-husband's dead body in a very discreet way but also her neighbor, Agustina, has cancer and is dying, so Raimunda has to go to the hospital to see her. Agustina has a request for Raimunda before she dies: that Raimunda inform her whether her mother is dead or alive. She also says that there is a friend who requested her to be on a TV show and wants to interview them about their mother's death and the fire that she died in, and Raimunda, who already has a lot on her plate, refuses to do so. Her daughter, Paula, ends up staying with Sole many times because Raimunda is trying to visit Agustina and also take care of getting rid of her husband's body. Raimunda gets her friends, Ines and Regina, to help her get the fridge with Paco's corpse into the van and then they dig a ditch and throw his body in there. While Raimunda is working at the restaurant, Agustina comes to see her and reminds her that she promised to tell her whether her mother is dead or alive. Apparently Raimunda got the story about her mother all wrong because Agustina tells her that the death of Raimunda's parents in the fire in the village and her mother's disappearance may be connected in some way, and tells Raimunda that it's possible that Agustina's mom was having a secret affair with Raimunda's dad, and that is why Agustina went to live with her grandmother. Raimunda didn't know that part of the story, and she thinks Agustina's lying, but Agustina insists that the death of Raimunda's parents and her mother's disappearance are deeply connected. Back at Sole's house, Irene is hiding under the bed and Paula is there with her, and she overhears the TV playing in the room. The women who are having their hair done by Irene are wondering why she disappeared when she was supposed to be doing their hair, but Sole can't tell them what is really going on. Sole, Raimunda and the woman getting her hair done go into the room to watch this show called Donde Quiera Que Estes (Wherever You Are). Agustina appears on the show, and the interviewer asks her to divulge details about her mother's disappearance and if there was another woman involved in the fire in Agustina's village. Agustina feels uncomfortable and refuses to talk about the details of the fire, and her sister expresses anger and disappointment when she does. It gets even more awkward when the interviewer announces Agustina has cancer, and so Agustina walks off the show. While preparing flan, Raimunda tells Sole that Agustina approached her asking for details about her mother's appearance and that Agustina said that her mother was having an affair with Raimunda and Sole's dad. It also turns out that there was more to this story than Raimunda thought, because Sole tells her that Irene has been around all this time, and that she stayed with Aunt Paula and took care of her and even helped out with Aunt Paula's funeral, so she was very much alive and contrary to what Raimunda and Sole thought, Aunt Paula was never alone because Irene was taking care of her. Sole takes her to her bedroom and Raimunda finds Irene very much alive and well, and she leaves with her daughter, Paula, shocked and in tears to find that no one told her that her mother was alive and that she didn't die in that fire in the village. Paula encourages Raimunda to go back to the house to talk with Irene and Irene later that evening while they are on a walk tells Raimunda everything that happened. She explains that she left Raimunda's father because he cheated on her with Agustina's mother. Not only that but Raimunda's father sexually abused Raimunda and she got pregnant and then had her daughter, Paula. He moved to Venezuela because he felt ashamed of what he did, and Irene felt angry that she didn't know that her husband was not only cheating on her with Agustina's mom but was also raping her daughter. And that is why she understood why Raimunda didn't talk to her for many years because she was still grappling with this painful trauma. Irene found her husband and Agustina's mother having sex in a hut and she set fire to it, killing them both. Before she went into hiding, she went to visit Aunt Paula, who lived alone, and decided to take care of her until her death. She went into hiding after setting fire to the hut and killing her husband and Agustina's mother because she didn't want to get caught, but even while in hiding, she suffered a lot and felt a lot of shame and pain for what happened. Irene visits Agustina when she is unwell and promises to take care of her because she feels bad about what she did to Agustina's mom, and Raimunda is about to tell her what happened to Paco but Irene insists she can tell her later. I thought the end credits were very interesting, because they are very colorful and flowery and yet this was such a dark movie. I did love how they made the designs, though, and also the music throughout the movie was really beautiful.
Honestly I think the part about this movie I loved the most was the acting and the dialogue. Penelope brought so much to her role as Raimunda and shows the psychological and emotional toll that grief took on her, and how she is was grappling with a lot of shame and trauma in her marriage to Paco and when her mother reveals what happened to her as a young woman. Grief is a central theme in this movie, but the movie also shows how it is also messy and complicated, especially when you find out that the person you thought was dead was actually alive the whole time. When Raimunda finds out her mother is actually alive, she feels pained because everyone kept this a secret from her and Sole and Paula didn't tell her that they had been hiding Irene in Sole's house while Raimunda continued to think that Irene was dead. I haven't seen any other films by the actresses who played the other characters, to be honest, and I haven't watched many other movies with Penelope Cruz. But after watching this and his 2016 drama, Julieta, I definitely want to check out more of Pedro Almodóvar's movies, especially his 2013 film I'm So Excited! and his most recent one, Parallel Mothers, which also stars Penelope Cruz and is on my watchlist.
Volver. 2006. 2 h 1 m. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Rated R for some sexual content and language.
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