Volver: Movie, DVD, Blu-ray Review (2006)

8/20/2007 Posted by Admin

"Volver"
Written and directed by Pedro Almodovar, 120 minutes, rated: R

Pedro Almodovar's "Volver" stars Penelope Cruz in a comeback performance that's so good, it recalls the film's title itself. In Spanish, "volver" means "to return," and that's exactly what Cruz has done here. She's fantastic.

The movie reminds you what all the hype was about when Cruz first hit the scene in the States in Fina Torres' 2000 film, "Woman on Top." In that movie, whether holding a tomato near her breasts and saying “you need to make sure they're full and plump” or lifting a chili pepper to her nose and inhaling its aroma while thinking of a man, there rarely was a moment that the actress wasn't smoldering with sexuality.

She was like a young Sophia Loren or Anna Magnani softened with the vulnerability of an Audrey Hepburn. When the movie became an underground hit, the Hollywood machine not surprisingly cheapened her appeal in such films as "Vanilla Sky," "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" and "Sahara." Later, when she became Tom Cruise's real-life love interest, there was the sense that that was it. We likely had lost her to Xenu on a DC-8 of no return.

But not so. Cruz is one of the key reasons to see "Volver," a comic melodrama with broad echoes of "Mildred Pierce" that gathers together a tight network of strong women--a staple in Almodovar's work--and becomes increasingly serious as the movie unfolds.

In the film, Cruz's Raimunda is first seen scrubbing graves with her daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo), sister Sole (Lola Duenas), and dozens of other women at a La Mancha cemetery before the death that surrounds them literally blows to the forefront of the movie.

Raimunda's elderly aunt (Chus Lampreave) is failing physically (though you'd never know it given the heartiness of her loud kissing), while at home, Raimunda's deadbeat husband, Paco (Antonio de la Torre), makes the mistake of trying to rape his own daughter. This leads to his bloody murder at the hands of Paula, with Raimunda, who is nothing if not resourceful, stepping in to dispose of the body while the plot thickens with the return of her mother, Irene (Carmen Maura), who died in a fire years before.

What's going on here? We'll leave that for Almodovar to explain, which he does with typical flourish and aplomb, but also with unusual reservoirs of restraint. It's a balance the director strikes throughout, and while that makes for a movie that's less showy than, say, Almodovar's "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," it also reveals the maturity of an artist working near the peak of his craft.

As for Cruz, returning to Spain and to her native language has left her transformed. No longer does she seem uncomfortable onscreen. Instead, with these words, this story, that talent and that body, she's unleashed. This is her third film with Almodovar--her first was 1997's "Live Flesh," her breakout was 1999's "All About My Mother," in which she played a pregnant nun infected with HIV--and she reaches deep here to mine a fiery, complex character that's her most compelling to date.

Grade: A

(Also available on Blu-ray disc)