Completing the List: 'Volver'

This is Part 3 in my four-part series on the films I haven’t seen from The New York Times’ recent list of the best films of the 21st century. Click on the respective links for my articles on Yi Yi and The Gleaners and I.

Few filmmakers, and even fewer male filmmakers, have made the inner lives of women a cornerstone of their filmographies like Spanish Director Pedro Almodóvar. He won an Oscar for his outstanding 1999 feature All About My Mother, which examines the intersecting lives of several women following a tragic death, and he provides a similar template for his 2006 film Volver. While the films share similar themes about renewal, reconnection, and rediscovery within complicated families, Volver is a sly take on the ghost story, arguing that real ghosts have nothing to do with the supernatural. They’re about women who honor the dead while having no one around to honor them.

That idea surfaces in the loaded opening shot as women come to tend the graves of their loved ones at a cemetery. Here we meet Raimunda (Penélope Cruz), her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo), and Raimunda’s sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) as they clean off the grave of their mother Irene (Carmen Maura), who died in a fire alongside their father four years earlier. We also meet Augustina (Blanca Portillo), a neighbor who has been looking in on Raimunda and Sole’s Aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave). For Raimunda, grief is a part of a duty. She works several different jobs because her husband, Paco (Antonio de la Torre), is a shiftless layabout. When Paula kills Paco after he attempts to sexually assault her, a shocked Raimunda quickly composes herself and sets to cleaning up the mess and hiding the body. During the cleanup, Raimunda’s neighbor, who is seeking to offload his restaurant downstairs, asks if she’ll keep an eye on it while he’s away. He then notices some blood on her neck, to which she quickly replies, “Women’s troubles.” It’s the kind of funny double entendre you can expect from Almodóvar.

A woman’s work is never done, and that appears to apply to the deceased Irene. Someone has been looking after Aunt Paula, who’s nearly blind and suffers from dementia. When Aunt Paula passes, Irene shows herself to Sole and asks if she can stay with her daughter under the guise of being a Russian immigrant working in Sole’s home salon. Irene is a ghost, but with none of the ethereal markers of the supernatural. For a film where the first act is steeped in death (the graveyard, Paco, Aunt Paula), Volver is more concerned with those who pass like ghosts among us.

The title “Volver” means “To Return,” and while Irene does return, it’s a sentiment that also applies to her family and Augustina. There are loads of soap opera touches here from the secret murder to an affair revealed later in the movie, and while Almodóvar is clearly aware of the outsized nature of these plot points, he grounds them in realistic characters who can’t afford to be carried away by dramatic circumstances. There’s too much work to do and too much responsibility to others. Keeping graves clean as a community event may seem like a sentimental gesture, but it emphasizes how much the women here feel like they owe to others while also, in turn, losing the individuality and identity that makes them truly alive.