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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Pedro Almodóvar’s women. Few filmmakers operating today are as distinctive as Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar, and sure enough his latest, Volver (“to come back”), is a return to some of his favourite themes and stylings: ripe melodrama, saturated colours, winsome Spanish ballads (the 1961 title song lip-synched by star Penelope Cruz in a key scene) and women. Lots of women. Some, as per the title of Almodóvar’s 1988 classic, hover on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Some on death’s door. One, seemingly, returned from the spirit world. But all occupy the feisty/ditzy arena through which Almodóvar heroines habitually wander. Chief among them is Cruz’s Raimunda, a struggling Madrid wife and mother whose life is turned upside down by both needing to dispose of her feckless husband’s corpse, killed by her abused daughter (don’t ask), and the possible resurrection of her supposedly deceased mother. Like the notorious, lunacy-inspiring wind that blows through the small Manchegan village from where her family hails, Raimunda is a force of nature. Through all her travails, she still finds time to reopen her own restaurant and help sort out the life of her daughter, sister and cancer-stricken family friend. An alternative, if more prosaic, movie title could easily be How To Be A Domestic Goddess if Nigella Lawson – whom the voluptuous Cruz could no doubt portray if Pedro ever decided on a biopic on the saucy English chef – hadn’t got there first. Almodóvar’s move away from the delirious, censor-baiting antics of his youth towards a more sober, yet equally lush and meditative stage of his career is catnip to more conservative prize-givers and award ceremonies, but also to a backlash. Repetition of style and ideas has left him open to criticisms of coasting: slow doesn’t mean deep; rich colour schemes speak less of psychological underpinning than mere surface decoration; and rather than really understanding and honouring women, he’s pandering to an ideal. All of which is, well, pretty rich. Precisely the consistency that auteur critics love about, say, Hitchcock or Godard seems a strange stick to beat our Pedro with. Tease the surface of Volver and there’s more than enough complexity, eccentricity and, yes, novelty to sit alongside Talk To Her or All About My Mother. Add Cruz in a career-best role as the curvy Raimunda, and the return of former Almodóvar muse Carmen Maura, and you’ve got, yawn, another classic. So what if it isn’t a comeback?
Leigh Singer
Volver, on selected release 25 August 06.
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comment by flyingtwinkle
Aug 30, 2006
A twist of nature, a comeback of mystery and suspense
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