Word: cruz
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...eyes, it was a fully satisfying comedy-melodrama about the burden of motherhood, the power of sisterhood. Volver begins with a tracking shot through the cemetery in a Spanish village, as dozens of widows polish the tombstones of their late husbands. Among the mourners is Raimunda (Penélope Cruz, in a performance of great strength and ferocity), scrubbing down the grave of her mother Irene (Carmen Maura). With his usual taste for bizarre but plausible narrative twists, Almodóvar manages, in the first 40 minutes, to get a corpse in the freezer and a ghost under...
...Code and X-Men: The Last Stand. But its usual fare is provocative or perplexing films from top directors. Three of the attention-grabbing entries: Volver Pedro Almodóvar blends ghost story, revenge drama and all-girl comedy in a tale of courageous, if loco, sisterhood. Lovely Penélope Cruz and spectral Carmen Maura merit laurels, maybe Oscars...
...cemetery in a Spanish village, as dozens of widows polish the tombstones of their late husbands. It is a collective act of devotion, of civic pride and maybe (from what we learn later in the film) of atonement. Among the mourner-scrubwomen are two sisters, Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and Soledad (Lola Dueñas), tending the grave of their mother Irene (Carmen Maura), dead these four years. Visiting Irene's older, failing sister Aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave), they hear the daft woman's claim that she has been cared for by Irene's ghost. This is dismissed...
...sometimes five, depending on how close they feel to the kissee. When Sole asks her niece Paula, "What's wrong with you?" (not knowing the girl has just been forced into murder), she shrugs and replies, "I'm at a difficult age." But the real epiphanies are not comic. Cruz, in a fortissimo performance, sings (lip-synchs, actually) the flamenco song "Volver" with a passion that expresses Raimunda's indomitable peasant will. And in a lovely moment, on the first night Irene has come to live with her, Sole crawls into bed and cuddles up with the sleeping ghost...
...actress and the director are back together, for another exploration of women in extremis, and they seem instantly in perfect synch. The last line of the film, which Cruz enunciates with a grand, simple intensity to Maura, could also be Almodovar's testimony to his old friend and star: "I don't know how I've lived all these years without...