How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (8 page)

Firmly grounded in reality, then, we follow Manuela over some few years as she becomes a substitute mother to several other characters: the brilliant but emotionally unstable lesbian actress who was the unwitting cause of Manuela's bereavement (played by the handsome Marisa Paredes, who had played Leo in
The Flower of My Secret
), and a young nun (Penélope Cruz) who's been seduced and made pregnant by the father, now dying of AIDS, of Manuela's dead son. (Since his affair with Manuela he's become a transsexual named Lola: even the men in this story aren't completely male.) What's remarkable about the film is that despite the presence of hyperbolic elements familiar from the earlier films—the addicts, the sex changes, the trannies, AIDS, the fatal accident, even the transplant clinic where Manuela works and where, in a horrible replay of the scenario with which
The Flower of My Secret
opens, she is compelled to sign the consent form permitting the extraction and use of her son's organs—the emotional tone is muted, tender, intense yet somehow sober. The film begins and ends with the death of a young person, but there is no question of such death being glamorized, sensationalized, or otherwise cheaply aestheticized; no question that the emphasis is on anything but life. It's as if, once again, Almodóvar were teasing us with elements from his earlier work only to bring us up short—to remind us of how far he'd come.

Looking back at the complex evolution of Almodóvar's style over the past two decades allows you, among other things, to see a secret and symbolic irony at play in Leo's argument with her editor in
The Flower of My Secret
. For Leo, greater artistic seriousness was represented by a commitment to subjects that seemed to her more grittily real, more violent, more working-class—more noir, in every sense—than the rose-
colored fantasy world of her romance novels, with (presumably) their reveries about intense attentions of men to the erotic and emotional needs of women. And yet the director's own progress to greater depth and maturity has moved, if anything, in the opposite direction.

 

The theme of returning to and suggestively recycling old material is at the very core of Almodóvar's new film, the Academy Award–nominated
Volver
, as its title reminds us. The Spanish verb
volver
means not only “to turn”—there is, indeed, a recurrent visual motif here of windmills turning—but “to return” and, with a verbal object, “to do again.” Here, as in
Talk to Her
, two women are at the center of connected plots; here, as in
All About My Mother
, the emphasis is on motherhood. Most remarkably, there is here a crucial allusion to the groundbreaking
Flower of My Secret
. For the plot of
Volver
is, in fact, the plot of the very novel that Leo, in her quest for seriousness, had tried and failed to publish in the earlier film. Exactly like Leo's novel,
The Cold Storage Room
, the new movie is about a mother (here called Raimunda), a lower-class cleaning woman, who learns that her deadbeat husband has tried to rape her daughter and, after the husband is murdered, disposes of the body in a freezer in a neighbor's restaurant.

We eventually learn that these crimes—the incest, the murder, the mother's willingness to do anything to protect the daughter—are echoes of, “returns” to, earlier crimes committed by Raimunda's own mother; but this internal return is nowhere near as interesting as the larger one taking place here, which is that of Almodóvar himself once again returning, with delicious self-consciousness, to an old plot—one that sounded hopelessly excessive, too much like his own early work—and reconfiguring it, as he does here even more radically than in his other recent films, in the subtle but provocative manner of his mature style.

Volver
dispenses fairly swiftly with two props of the old Almodóvar style: melodrama and men. Indeed, an arresting opening sequence suggestively emphasizes what will be the film's exclusive focus on female experience: it's a shot of the women of a small provincial town vigor
ously cleaning the tombstones of their relatives (or, in the case of one significant character, her own tomb). It is in this context of death and hard female labor that we are introduced to Raimunda, who lives in Madrid but has come for this ritual visit to her parents' graves (we learn that the couple died together in a fire three years earlier); to her daughter, Paula, a fourteen-year-old nymphet; to her plain-looking sister, Sole; and to their old friend and neighbor Agustina, who has remained in the village and who looks after Raimunda's senile old aunt, also called Paula. A visit to Tía Paula's house is charged—characteristically, as it will turn out—with intense familial emotion and with the specter of the macabre, even the supernatural. For even as the lonely old woman tells her nieces that “the important thing is that you come back [
volver
],” we soon learn that someone else may have come back, too: the two sisters' dead mother, Irene, whose ghost neighbors claim to have seen, and who Tía Paula herself, perhaps not as crazy as she sounds, insists has been doing the housework for her and cooking her meals.

Soon we are back in the big city, Madrid, where the relationships among these women—the supposedly dead mother included, as it will turn out—are the objects of the film's restrained and loving attention. Indeed, the knifing of Paco, Raimunda's husband (a crime committed by young Paula as he tries to rape her), and the disposal of his body are handled with a semi-comical brusqueness; the fact that Raimunda gets away with cleaning up the crime scene and transporting the body from the house to a nearby restaurant freezer and then to a makeshift grave suggests the filmmaker's own desire simply to be rid of the men here, too—they're just a plot mechanism, a way of focusing our attention on the women. In earlier films in which murders occur (
The Law of Desire
,
Matador
), Almodóvar was clearly intrigued by the high drama afforded by police procedurals; here there are no cops on the murderer's trail, and the only procedure associated with the crime is the almost lovingly filmed sequence in which Raimunda, who cleans vast office buildings for a living, expertly and unsentimentally wipes up the blood with paper towels and then mops the floor. As a cover-up she merely tells everyone that Paco has left her and Paula; when Sole insists that he'll come back (
volverá
), “I don't think so” is the ever-practical Raimunda's opaque reply. To his credit, the director doesn't milk the line for a laugh, as he could well do—as indeed he would have done fifteen years ago.

 

If anything, when men turn up here, they're soon dismissed; the emphasis repeatedly returns to the bonds that connect these hardworking women. An ongoing joke of the film is the fact that after Raimunda takes over her neighbor's restaurant (typically, he's conveniently gone out of town and we soon forget about him) and makes it thrive, she repeatedly rejects the attentions of the handsome young guy, a member of a film crew, who has hired her to cater for them. The real focus is, if anything, on the way in which a couple of Raimunda's girlfriends, one of whom is a hardworking local prostitute, end up chipping in to help her with her burgeoning business—the way in which these women, without men, start to thrive. Regina, the whore, ends up helping her friend transport and bury the freezer, too—no questions asked. In earlier films, Almodóvar's women were the sort who relied on the comfort of strangers; here, they rely on each other.

It's a tribute to how intensely Almodóvar focuses our attention on female relationships that even after the graphic murder of Paco and the black comedy about the disposal of his body, the only mysteries and the only death we care to solve or to mourn are those involving women. The death is that of Raimunda's beloved Tía Paula, who, she learns after Paco is killed, has died the night before—an event to which, the women of the village insist, Agustina has been alerted by no less a personage than the ghost of Raimunda's mother. A strikingly photographed scene of the old lady's funeral, which shows us, from above, the black-clad townswomen batting their fans and surrounding Sole while we hear the insistent susurration of their prayers, suggests once again—perhaps because it suggests a hive of bees—the theme of feminine emotional solidarity.

Of the two mysteries we are meant to care about, the first has to do with the disappearance of Agustina's mother, a local eccentric who, Agustina tells Paula, had once been the rural town's only hippie, and who disappeared the day that Raimunda's parents perished—a mystery that torments her plain, kindly daughter, who is dying of cancer. (Agustina begs Raimunda to help her solve the riddle before she dies, even if it means appealing to ghosts—a suggestion that an incredulous Raimunda, never one for fanciful solutions to real-life problems, emphatically rejects.) The second mystery concerns the true identity of
the woman who's buried in Irene's tomb. For it soon evolves that the ghost story is another tease, another suggestion of narrative fancy that is soon abandoned in favor of something real. Irene, we learn, is no apparition, and when she finally makes herself known to her daughters and granddaughter, she confesses to a crime that not only explains the disappearance of Agustina's mother, but brings about a violently emotional confrontation on the part of all four women with a crime committed by the dead husband, a crime far more terrible than adultery or murder in self-defense: incestuous abuse of the young Raimunda. Irene's discovery of this crime, along with her knowledge of the husband's affair with Agustina's mother, is, we learn, what led her to set the fire that killed the adulterous couple.

The terrible secrets revealed by a sorrowing Irene explain the cause of the long estrangement between her and her now-grown daughter: the daughter's rage at the mother's failure to see what was happening, the mother's uncomprehending resentment before she did learn the truth. More emotionally significant still, the sensational revelation makes us realize that the two women are poignantly similar to each other: in the daughter the admirable spirit of the mother has, after all, “returned.” Each, after all, is a mother who has been willing to incur an awful guilt in order to punish a terrible crime against her daughter: although it's the young Paula and not Raimunda who kills Paco, Raimunda makes it clear that she's willing to take the blame if the crime is ever discovered. (Incestuous abuse by a terrible father is itself a motif to which Almodóvar has returned here: it occurs as an eleventh-hour revelation in
The Law of Desire
, but there it feels gratuitous—it's just another outrageous incident among many, introduced as an attempt to explain a character's erotic life. Here, it has greater narrative significance and a profounder emotional impact.)

The irony of
Volver
's reenactment of the fictional plot from
The Flower of My Secret
is that the real focus, the real story here, is not in fact what had seemed so repellently sensational to Leo's editor—the murders, the dead bodies, the poverty—but rather a series of subtle, complicated, intense yet finally manageable feelings among female characters, emotions that, in the new film, really do constitute a kaleidoscopic vision of what “True Love” is. The self-wounding anger borne by daughters against their mothers; the subtly etched competitiveness between close
friends and particularly between sisters (Almodóvar and his excellent cast brilliantly evoke the intricate currents that run back and forth between the plain Sole and the beautiful Raimunda, played with great effectiveness by Penélope Cruz, who seems at once more voluptuous and tougher than in her earlier work for Almodóvar, and who has certainly earned her Oscar nomination); the immense and unbearable pain felt by Irene (the great Carmen Maura), a mother who has inadvertently wounded her child by failing to see what was happening to her: these things occupy our attention to the exclusion of virtually everything else, with satisfying results.

 

This newly exclusive focus on deep emotions among fairly ordinary people has proved a bit disconcerting for many who have come to enjoy the cinematic brand that “Almodóvar film” has long represented. The comparatively subdued reception that
Volver
has received may have much to do with the fact that the film does not deliver the kind of fun we've come to associate for a long time with this director's work—or even with the kinds of extremities of incident and character that his fine, more recent work still revels in: the fantasy silent movies, the miraculous re-animations of comatose girls, the glitter and gore of the corrida.

Here I should mention a “return” of my own. On my first viewing of it, I was fairly unaffected by
Volver
, largely, I think, because what I saw on screen strayed so far from my expectations of it (particularly having read of the murder with which it begins). Gone were the men, the eroticizing of the masculine that to my mind had always seemed to give the director's films either a campy or an erotic traction; gone, too, was the ostentatious appeal to “marginal” elements, gone the elaborate narrative frames created by reference to icons of pop culture, the films within films and plays within films, that gave the earlier work an elaborate and sometimes delicious self-consciousness. The only bit of trashy pop culture you get in the new movie is a scene in which the cancer-ridden Agustina goes on a daytime talk show to appeal to the viewing public for information about her mother; significantly, instead of embracing that tacky form of entertainment, the film rejects it—Agustina walks off the set in disgust, and keeps her stories to herself in the end. The only performance you get here, moreover, is an almost painfully
sincere one: at the wrap party for the film crew, Raimunda, who we learn had once auditioned for a talent show, shyly sings a song called “Volver.” (One lyric is “I'm afraid of the encounter with the past that's coming back.”) What's interesting here is that this performance itself represents a significant moment of what you might call aesthetic refining: the song in question, familiar to denizens of the Hispanic world as a famous tango from the 1930s—a flashy bit of pop culture if ever there was one—becomes, in Raimunda's tremulous rendition, a deeply soulful flamenco piece. And the only outtake from another director's work is a terribly brief glimpse of the movie that Irene watches as she cares for Agustina: Visconti's 1951 film
Bellissima
, in which a mother goes to poignantly fantastic extremes to make her little daughter a child film star.