Volver pedro almodovar quites
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In the course of Volver there is a bloody killing and some near-farcical maneuvers with a corpse, but the heart of the movie is the peculiar geometry of a mother, two daughters, and a granddaughter-with plenty of shared dark secrets but no one privy to all of them. Rumors abound she’s being cared for by the ghost of Raimunda’s mother, who in due course appears to Raimunda’s sister, Sole (Lola Dueñas)-and is embodied (hooray!) by Carmen Maura, the sprightly ghost of Almodóvar movies past. Raimunda has come home to visit her mother’s grave and her elderly aunt, who manages, mysteriously, to clean and cook for herself despite the dwindling of her short- and long-term memory-and much of her memory in between. This is a Cruz of substance, of chest tones, of formidable cleavage, a woman completely credible in the role of a bedraggled mother carrying the burden of an unemployed, alcoholic, lecherous spouse and an ingenuous daughter (Yohana Cobo) with no inkling of her budding attractions or sordid origins. Then the camera comes to rest on Raimunda, played by Penélope Cruz-and not the twittering Spanish Minnie Mouse who was Tom’s incongruous appendage. It’s the old matriarchs we see as Volver begins, the camera gliding past a row of headstones to which they ritually tend, Alberto Iglesias’s music bouncing along rambunctiously, with just a hint of dissonance. The movie unfolds in a female-centric universe, in which the women keep their families together in the face of male inconstancy-or worse. Before it loses its fizz-maybe two thirds of the way through- Volver offers the headiest pleasures imaginable.
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Now comes Volver, a surefire crowd-pleaser that takes you back to Almodóvar’s women on the campy verge, but this time in an airy, slyly understated, light-fantastical style. The noirish puzzle Bad Education gives you flashbacks within flashbacks, stories within stories-each stream circling in on the movie’s final, horrific revelation. Talk to Her, which centers on a transgressive love, is flabbergastingly matter-of-fact in its acceptance (as opposed to embrace) of sexual perversity. In his female-bonding tearjerker All About My Mother, women (in Almodóvar’s universe, the label includes transvestites and transsexuals) cluster together for warmth after the death of the heroine’s teenage son (perhaps a stand-in for the director himself). What a run this millennium for Pedro Almodóvar: one strange and fabulous feature after the next, each in a different style, each so deftly controlled that you hardly register its subversiveness until after you’ve been hooked by its story. Photo: Emilio Pereda and Paola Ardizzoni/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics