I have to own up to a massive whole in my film watching history: this was the first film by Almodóvar that I had ever seen, although I'd been aware of his work for many years. Needless to say it blew me away and I now have my own copy of DVD as well.
this is one of the fist examples of me committing to produce notes on a film I had not seen. Having just re-read the notes I hope they stand the test of time:
VOLVER/COMING HOME
Spain 2006, 121 minutes
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Starring: Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura etc
Awards and Nominations:
Winner: Ensemble Cast (Joint Winners of
Best Actress)
Pedro
Almodóvar (Best Screenplay)
Nomination: Golden Palm
Oscar Nominations: Penélope Cruz (Best Actress in a
Leading Role)
BAFTA Nominations: Best Film Not in the English Language
Penélope
Cruz (Best Actress in a Leading Role)
Volver, which translates into English as Coming Home or Coming Back, is an intriguing melodrama inspired by the trash TV that is the soundtrack to its characters’ lives. Penélope Cruz is Raimunda, a hard-working woman with a teenage daughter and a feckless, lazy husband. With her sister Sole she tends the graves of her parents and visits her ailing aunt Paula, who is in the final stages of dementia. There is a sudden act of violence which destroys Raimunda’s family life and a secret about her late mother Irene that emerges when Irene returns from beyond the grave to contact her astonished daughters.
Almodóvar is the most successful
and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation. He started making films in 1980, but did not
have his first international success until Woman
on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in 1988. He followed this with Live Flesh (1997), based on
a novel by English crime writer Ruth Rendell, All About My Mother
(1999), which won an Oscar for Best Foreign film and a Best Director Award for Almodóvar
and which has just been staged as a play at the Old Vic in London, and Talk To Her (2002) which won an Oscar
for Best Original Screenplay. All
his films are marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama
and use elements of pop culture and irreverent humour. He describes Volver as a cross between Mildred
Pierce, in which a career woman takes the rap for a murder that her
daughter has committed, and Arsenic and
Old Lace, which involves a pair of
old ladies involved in homicide, and in it he somehow manges to connect the
various narrative strands into a lucid pattern of generational conflict and
female bonding that remains psychologically convincing.
Penélope Cruz gives a brilliant performance as Raimunda, and in a superb female ensemble cast Carmen Maura, outrageous star of Almodóvar’s earlier films, as Irene also stands out. Penélope Cruz was deservedly nominated for a Best Actress Award for her performance, but not for the fist time the Cannes Jury decided to go one better: having decided that it was impossible to choose between all the performances, they uniquely awarded the Best Actress Award to the Ensemble Cast.
Here's the trailer:
