The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

Volver: Women of La Mancha

June 11th, 2007

First, a confession: Volver is my first Pedro Almodóvar film. I’m still learning what make his films distinctive. Already, I feel like I need to watch Volver again in order to fully appreciate it.

For one thing, it’s hard to classify the movie as a particular genre. Most label it as a “comedy,” though I’d say it’s definitely a dark one. It also has some elements of melodrama, not to mention hints of the supernatural.

Moreover, I have trouble determining my initial response to the film, because it’s very risky character-wise. The main character, Raimunda (Penelope Cruz), seems inaccessible in her matter-of-fact, business-is-business busy-ness—until, towards the end of the movie, you learn one fact about her character that changes your whole perception of her. Suddenly, all her previous actions make sense. It’s almost like Almodóvar invites and expects repeat viewings.

For most of the film, Raimunda bustles around (with her famously padded posterior*), telling various characters she’s too busy for this or that. She doesn’t seem to have the time to deal with her teenage daughter’s emotional trauma or to go to the funeral of her beloved aunt. Granted, this is because she has to dispose of her husband’s corpse—and find a way to make a living in his absence (though she was the primary breadwinner even when he was alive).

Yes, the women of La Mancha are busy; unlike the most famous “Man of La Mancha,” Don Quixote, they have no time or leisure to go crazy. Though the film refers to how the fierce Manchego wind can drive people insane, these women are do-ers, not dreamers. Almodóvar says in his commentary that these, in essence, are the women of his youth, women like his mother. But his film imbues even their mundane household tasks with significance. Throughout the film, we see Raimunda washing dishes in the kitchen sink, then later washing her husband’s blood off a knife in that same sink, and finally using that knife to chop vegetables in the restaurant she has opened.

(I should mention that the film doesn’t entirely take place in La Mancha; Raimunda’s apartment and restaurant are both in Madrid, but she is a native of La Mancha, and it’s clear that the region haunts her in more ways than one.)

The few men of Volver are drunkards, slobs, sexual offenders. If these were truly the sort of men Almodóvar grew up with, no wonder his movies are famous for focusing on women. I can’t decide whether I’m touched or troubled—or both—by the very close relationships the director has adopted with a series of favorite female actors as his muses. These relationships aren’t sexual (Almodóvar is openly gay), but the mutual idolization society that has formed between Almodóvar and his current muse, Penelope Cruz, is so intense that it seems like both parties are bound to be disillusioned at some point. But, on the other hand, maybe that’s the kind of risk that has garnered his works such praise.

A former Almodóvar muse, Carmen Maura, has an important role in Volver as Raimunda’s mother, who may or may not be a ghost. For me, Maura’s Irene was the most interesting character in the film. Like the other women in the film, she seems more a woman of action rather than of deep reflection. A few years of near-solitude, haunting her elderly sister’s house, seems to have given her time, however, to decide how to respond emotionally to the events of her life and her daughters’ lives. When she openly deals with some of the tragic family history, it opens up the opportunity for the other characters to do so as well.

In some of its themes, most notably dealing with family sexual abuse, Volver reminded me of Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding. It’s easier to immediately like Monsoon Wedding: when the sexual offender is cast out, everything explodes in joyful color and sound. Volver is in some ways more subtle and in some ways more over-the-top. I should watch it again . . . but there are so many movies in my Netflix queue! Maybe I’ll rewatch it in a couple of years, after I’ve seen some other Almodóvar flicks.

*For several months surrounding Volver’s release, it seemed no one could discuss the film without mentioning how Cruz wore bottom-padding for the role. The explanation I’d often heard was that Almodóvar didn’t think she looked “Spanish” enough. According to Cruz in a DVD-extra interview, that wasn’t the case at all. Rather, since Cruz’s character had given birth as a teenager—and Cruz herself has never had a child—the goal was to provide a more realistic figure, with the wider hips of a woman who’s gone through childbirth. Interesting that the U.S. media fixated on “ethnic” appearance, while the true explanation had more to do with common biology (albeit biology that Hollywood commonly ignores).

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