VOLVER DE PEDRO ALMODÓVAR

I’m going talk about a film that is called “Volver”. Volver is a Spanish drama film written and directed by Pedro Almódovar. The famous film stars Penelope Cruz (Spanish famous actress who won an Oscar Prize, three times winner of a Goya Prize and others awards). The film has a great cast of actresses including Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Blanca Portillo, YohanaCobo y ChusLampreave. It is about an eccentric family of women from a windy region south of Madrid, Penelope Cruz plays Raimunda, a working-class woman forced to do everything possible to protect her 14-year-old daughter Paula (YohanaCobo). To top off the family crisis, her mother Irene (Carmen Maura) returns from the dead to close pending cases.

Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) is a young and enterprising mother, with a unemployed husband and a daughter in full adolescence. The family economy is very precarious, so Raimunda has several jobs. She is a very strong woman, a born fighter, but at the same time very emotionally fragile. Since childhood she has been keeping a terrible secret silent . Her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) is a little older. Her husband abandoned her and since then lives alone. One spring Sunday, Sole calls Raimunda to tell her that Agustina (Blanca Portillo), a neighbor of the town, has told her by phone that her aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave) has died. Raimunda loved her aunt, but she can't go to the funeral because just before receiving her sister's call she found her dead husband in the kitchen, with a knife stuck in his chest. Her daughter confesses that she has killed him because the father, drunk, harassed her insistently. Reluctantly, Sole travels alone to the town. Among the women who accompany her in the duel she hears rumors that her mother (who died in a fire with her father) returned from the other world to take care of her aunt Paula, who was ill in recent years. The neighbors speak naturally of the "ghost" of the mother (Carmen Maura). When Sole returns to Madrid, after parking her car, she hears some sounds coming from the trunk. Sole opens it and there finds, surrounded by bags, the ghost of his mother. Sole has no choice but to live with the maternal ghost and integrate it into the work of the hairdresser. For her part, Raimunda only tells her that Paco, her husband, has left them and that he senses that he will not return. He is really trying to get rid of the body. The unsustainable becomes everyday, each by her side, the two sisters undertake a flight forward, surviving very tense, melodramatic, comic and also very exciting situations. Both women solve them based on impudence and lying without the slightest containment. "Back" is a survival story. All the characters fight to survive, even the grandmother's ghost.


It seems to me that it is one of the best films in spanish cinematography, so I would like to recommend it.

I reckon that this film shows the lifestyle in the early decade of 2000, and criticizes some aspects of society and it portrays the best of the director.What I like most about the film is the intelligent mix between humour, drama and family offered by this great work by Almódovar.


The film besides being one of being a wonderful cinematographic work has a beautiful soundtrack sung by Estrella Morente, which is called "Volver" in the same way as the film.



Ana Fernández García (2º BA)