Word: volver
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...laurels (including a Best Screenplay Oscar for Talk to Her), Pedro, as all call him, had never won a Cannes Palme d'Or. Best Director for All About My Mother was the best he'd done. So this year, with his brand-new Volver, he was an early favorite to cop the top prize...
...Volver begins with a tracking shot through the 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...
...Volver, which means "return," is an apt title for a movie that marks a return both to Pedro's early, realistic melodramas and to the plot of All About My Mother. In both movies, an important male character dies violently in the first 20 mins.; the story then traces the lead female character's reliance on other women to get through difficult times, even as she helps them. There are differences, of course. The earlier film defined motherhood as nurturing life; the new one adds to that the mission of angelic vengeance, in which women determine that the sexual sins...
...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 of her mother...
...pleasure - mine, anyway - to come to Cannes knowing that, every two years, Pedro can be counted on to bring another splendid film. Is Volver a masterpiece? Probably not. But it is the work of a master still at the peak, the high plateau, of his form...