MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios

(Frauen am Rande des Nervenzusammenbruchs [de] • Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown [en])

Spain 1988
d: Pedro Almodóvar
MGM/UA Home Entertainment (Region 1 us)

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¡Átame!

(Fessle mich [de] • Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! [en])

Spain 1990
d: Pedro Almodóvar
Anchor Bay Entertainment / Miramax (Region 1 us)

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After the kitschy melodrama of "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown", Almodóvar returns to the darker terrain of "Law of Desire", concentrating on the relationship between soft-porn actress Marina (Abril) and the two men who try to control her. The more benign is her director in the movie-within-the-movie (Rabal), a genial, wheelchair-bound obsessive who leaves romantic messages on her answering machine and beguiles his lonely hours watching her masturbate on video. Less kindly are the attentions of Ricky (Banderas), recently released from a psychiatric hostel and determined to father Marina's children. He kidnaps her in her apartment, beats her up, and ties her to the bed while he goes out to score drugs for her. Almodóvar turns a standard hostage thriller into a grim examination of the power games implicit in marriage; Marina, addictive in all things, soon becomes a willing accomplice in Ricky's fantasy. Almodóvar withholds all comment, and many will hate his refusal to moralise; others will relish the opportunity to think for themselves. A very black comedy in the vein of Buñuel's "Belle de Jour", and worthy of the comparison.
— RS, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
The shock effects of Almodovar's earlier work were considerably diluted in his Lubitschian crazy-love roundelay, WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, and TIE ME UP!, despite its bondage theme and lightly sadomasochistic overtones, makes a similar attempt to enter the mainstream. The film recalls Hitchcock's THE 39 STEPS, with its bickering handcuffed lovers, as well as the sweeping romantic intensity of Douglas Sirk's 1950s trash-fests. Ennio Morricone's ubiquitous music contributes to this attempt to explore the traditions of classic cinema, but it lacks the savvy, finger-popping verve of the more street-smart scores of other Almodovar films. The screenplay lacks the frantic multitude of characters that have typified Almodovar's work, and the non-sequiturs and comic asides we have come to expect are also kept to a minimum. Staying with TIE ME UP! demands some patience, but the director's timing never fails him, and he brings things to a close on an upbeat note.
— TV MovieGuide
•••••
Le premier film à peu près normal d’Almodóvar ; en tout cas s’agit-il de l’histoire d’un fou qui aimerait mener une vie normale : se marier, fonder une famille, trouver un emploi. Sorti d’un centre psychiatrique, Ricki enlève et séquestre chez elle une actrice porno pour lui donner l’opportunité de le connaître et de tomber amoureuse de lui comme lui l’est d’elle. « J’ai 23 ans, cinquante mille pesetas et je suis seul au monde. J’aimerais être un bon mari pour toi, et un bon père pour tes enfants »… Thriller loufoque ? Au final une histoire d’amour. Une comédie romantique.
— Cinémathèque Toulouse

Tacones lejanos

(High Heels - Die Waffen einer Frau [de])

Spain / France 1991
d: Pedro Almodóvar
TF1 Vidéo (Region 2 fr)

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Almodóvar ditches gender-bending, drug-abusing anarchy for a more sober meditation on the importance of family. Newsreader Rebecca (Abril) is obsessed by her glamorous pop singer mother (Paredes), who left her as a child. The reunion after 15 years is difficult, not least because Rebecca has married her mother's old boyfriend; and when he is murdered, suspicion alights on them both. The performances are superb, with a raw emotion that is uncomfortably voyeuristic to watch; and the central scene, around which the rest of the film was constructed, is an astonishing tragic-comic tour de force: Rebecca broadcasts the latest news on the murder of her own husband, then almost breaks down as she shows snapshots of ordinary household objects. It's sad and funny, but like the rest of the film, mostly sad. And therein lies the problem: the overwrought, almost physical love/hate relationship between the two women never quite rings true, and Almodóvar has crossed the thin comedic line that separated Law of Desire and Matador from cloying melodrama. You come out bruised, thoughtful, but unredeemed.
— DW, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
The plot of Pedro Almodovar's goofy melodrama has more twists than a rattlesnake, but whether it's meant mainly for laughs or for more serious engagement isn't always clear, because it keeps shifting back and forth between modes. The story centers on the reunion of an aging pop star (Marisa Paredes) and her grown daughter (Victoria Abril), a TV anchorwoman, after a 15-year separation. The daughter's husband, who owns the TV station where she works, turns out to be the mother's former lover, and after he's found murdered a number of bizarre facts are brought to light, including the diverse involvements of a female impersonator (Miguel Bose) who specializes in tributes to the mother. The results oscillate between Almodovar's characteristically flaky irreverence and a more solemn treatment of the relationship between mother and daughter that intermittently suggests Douglas Sirk without his ironies. It's a lot more fun to watch than Almodovar's previous Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, but those who miss the wildness of his premainstream work will probably be only partially appeased.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

La Flor de mi Secreto

(Mein blühendes Geheimnis [de] • La fleur de mon secret [fr])

Spain / France 1995
d: Pedro Almodóvar
TF1 Vidéo (Region 2 fr)

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Here we have Almodóvar's most open, unadorned, emotive and maybe even courageous film to date, an intimate portrait of pain and regeneration that strikes the heart without trickery. Gone are the chic excesses of "Kika" and the uneasy balance between superficial sensationalism and pocket melodrama that's marked the director's work since "Women on the Verge". Paredes is immensely sympathetic as Leo, a forty-something writer of romantic fiction who hits crisis point when she's rejected by her absentee husband and finds she's trapped by her reputation when she tries to expand her literary horizons. Although she's supported by Angel (Echanove), cultural editor of El País, the constant bickering between her mother and sister doesn't help matters (Lampreave and de Palma, in a double-act to treasure); a trip home to her native village in La Mancha proves, however, an unlikely source of solace. Rarely has Almodóvar focused so closely on a single character, and the challenge of developing an individual portrait has reconnected him with the emotional realities of an everyday damaged life, where loneliness, professional frustration and the irritation and commitment that permeate family relationships are observed with perceptiveness, honesty and the usual incisive humour.
— TJ, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Despite their consistently bright, pop-art look, Almodovar's recent films have crept steadily away from the anarchic comedy of WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN in the direction of straightforward melodrama. And while this is the first time he's adapted another writer's material, it's pretty clear that what he saw in Rendell's novel was a variation on the theme of obsessive love to which he himself has returned, well, obsessively. The result is undeniably gorgeous, but it's all busy surface, beautiful bodies and ironically absurd plot contrivance, occasionally awkward references to political events in '70s Spain notwithstanding. Featuring Luis Bunuel's brilliantly unsettling CRIMINAL LIFE OF ARCHIBALDO DE LA CRUZ on Elena's TV only serves as an unfortunate reminder of how rich apparently trifling films can be.
— Maitland McDonagh, TV MovieGuide
•••••
Après un Kika nerveux où l’humanisme était en proie à un monde immoral ne s’embarrassant pas de sensibilité, Pedro Almodóvar revenait avec cette fleur touchante de sensiblerie pour embrasser la grande émotion. Un portrait tout en profondeur et délicatesse d’une femme en crise. Un portrait sobre, parce qu’il n’y a pas que le mode hystérique pour parler d’une femme en crise, dit Almodóvar. Le portrait d’une écrivain de romans à l’eau de rose qui se laisse envahir par de moroses idées à cause d’un mari absent…
— Cinémathèque Toulouse

Carne trémula

(Live Flesh - Mit Haut und Haar [de] • Live Flesh [en])

Spain / France 1997
d: Pedro Almodóvar
MGM/UA Home Entertainment (Region 1 us)

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Todo sobre mi madre

(Alles über meine Mutter [de])

Spain / France 1999
d: Pedro Almodóvar
Fox Pathé Europa (Region 2 fr)

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After the death of her beloved teenage son in an accident, Roth leaves Madrid for Barcelona to cope with her grief, hook up with old friends, and - just maybe - contact the long-estranged father the boy never knew. As she gradually regains the will to live through her involvement with the lives of others (including her son's favourite stage diva Paredes), Almodóvar piles on the coincidences, contrivances and twists so that the film succeeds best as a beautifully crafted, semi-ironic melodrama (it cleverly alludes to - and integrates - "All About Eve", "Streetcar...", "Capote", etc). Though the film has a fair share of camp humour, it's the formal and emotional sophistication that really impresses; like "Live Flesh", it displays a depth and maturity lacking in Almodóvar's earlier work.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
According to most of the American mainstream press at the 1999 Cannes film festival, this consciousness-raising transsexual soap opera by aging Spanish enfant terrible Pedro Almodovar should have walked off with all the prizes. I guess it represents a significant advance in his career, giving us a kinder, gentler, more soulful Almodovar who makes a lot more references than usual to other movies: All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire especially, but also (in terms of the story's point of departure) John Cassavetes's Opening Night. For me it felt like a good many weeks at a politically correct summer camp, though the talented actors--including Cecilia Roth, Eloy Azorin, Marisa Paredes, Toni Canto, Antonia San Juan, and Penelope Cruz--certainly seem to enjoy the taste of the characters they're playing. Personally I prefer just about anything by John Waters, but this has a certain piquancy that makes up for the somewhat strained effort to seem witty and daring.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
•••••
Almodóvar's All About My Mother is as straightforward and plot-driven as any movie about life imitating art imitating life could possibly be. ... All About My Mother is a movie in which wallpaper patterns border on the lysergic, women typically wear red, and characters are prone to compare any given situation to something out of How to Marry a Millionaire. It is also a movie in which forms of motherhood proliferate—as does the kindness of strangers—and fathers are generally worse than useless. Although Manuela never gets over her son's death (throughout, she is compelled to repeat the story of his fatal accident), Almodóvar does contrive to crown her maternal sorrow with a climactic miracle.
— J. Hoberman
•••••
A hit in Europe and a big success at Cannes, All About My Mother proves that Pedro Almodovar is one of the greats of European cinema, blessed with the secret weapon of imagination.
— Sight & Sound

Hable con ella

(Sprich mit ihr [de])

Spain / USA 2002
d: Pedro Almodóvar
Universum Film-UFA / Atlas / Tobis (Region 2 de)

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Two strangers are seated next to one another at a Pina Bausch ballet in Madrid: Benigno (Cámara), a private clinic nurse tending to the comatose young Alicia (Watling); and Marco (Grandinetti), a journalist who, due to an encounter with bullfighter Lydia (Flores), will find himself visiting, months later, the same clinic. Not a word passes between the men as they watch the sleepwalkers on stage, but Benigno does notice the tears in Marco's eyes. To reveal more than the first few minutes of Almodóvar's purposefully meandering narrative would diminish your enjoyment. What at first might appear a beautiful, but insubstantial confection steadily grows into his most mature and richly rewarding film to date, alongside "All About My Mother". Who today but Almodóvar could switch smoothly between profound emotion and ethical inquiry, high art and gags about bodily functions? Who else would digress with a pastiche silent movie that would never have been greenlit, yet bother (or manage) to make it spot-on in style (Murnau) and structurally essential? About love, loss, loneliness, doubt, desire, faith, forgiveness and the importance of honest communication with oneself and others, the film combines sensuality, spirituality and sheer joy in storytelling in marvellously harmonious proportions.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Pedro Almodovar's transformation from scrappy, epater le bourgeois rude boy into sophisticated interpreter of modern melodramas is remarkable, all the more so because he retained his anarchic energy and gleeful willingness to affront conventional mores. This ode to the peculiar strength and flexibility of love, romantic and platonic, is simultaneously perverse, overwrought, deeply creepy and truly moving, a high-wire act that finds humor in the grotesque and hope in emotional malformation....
The film is a study in ironies, without being "ironic" in the cheap, popular sense. It could be taken as a joke that Benigno and Marco get along better with their comatose girlfriends than they ever did when the women were awake. But it's a resigned joke, tossed off so lightly that the sting is easily missed, and ultimately untrue as well — one man profoundly betrays his sleeping beauty, and the other is betrayed. Almodovar's depiction of life with the profoundly compromised — the endless rituals of grooming, washing, turning to prevent bedsores, massage to keep the skin supple, manipulation of limbs to keep muscles from atrophying and joints locking — is simultaneously intimate and dispassionate, and he displaces the story's most disturbing turn into a silent film-within-the-film called "The Shrinking Lover," in which a Buster Keaton-esque man about town quaffs his brainy girlfriend's revolutionary weight-loss potion, only to shrink to the size of a Ken doll. His transformation of adversity into bizarrely liberating fantasy mirrors the dazzling achievement of Almodovar's slyly compassionate film.
— Maitland McDonagh, TV MovieGuide
•••••
La force et la beauté de Parle avec elle tiennent à un équilibre parfait entre la singularité d'une histoire trouble de passion-possession, nécrophile et morbide à la fois et son universalité à laquelle toute personne, en raison de son attachement au cinéma (...) sera sensible et pourra partager.
— Charles Tesson, Cahiers du Cinéma
•••••
Great filmmakers push their ideas and characters to the limit, unafraid of consequences - which is what Pedro Almodovar has done in Talk To Her, his latest film and, I think, his best.
— Chicago Tribune, Michael Wilmington
•••••
« Parle avec elle est une histoire sur l’amitié entre deux hommes, sur la solitude et la longue convalescence due aux blessures de la passion. C’est aussi un film sur l’impossible dialogue dans le couple, mais aussi sur la communication, sur le cinéma comme sujet de conversation. Le film cherche à démontrer 1- qu’un monologue face au mutisme peut s’avérer être une forme de dialogue, 2- comment le silence peut exprimer l’éloquence du corps, 3- comment le cinéma peut apparaître comme un lien idéal dans les relations entre les gens, et, 4- comment le cinéma raconté avec des mots peut retenir le temps et s’installer aussi bien dans le vie du narrateur que dans celle de celui qui écoute. »
— Pedro Almodóvar

La Mala educación

(Bad Education [en])

Spain 2004
d: Pedro Almodóvar
Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment / Sony Pictures Classic (Region 1 us)

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Almodóvar spins a serpentine story of a sentimental miseducation through a virtuoso spectrum of hues, from the gaudiest camp to the glassiest noir. A tortuous love triangle refracted through three time-periods and myriad layers of make-believe, it's also full of autobiographical flourishes and teases, starting in 1980 with the character of a New Wave film director, Enrique Goded (Martínez), rummaging through the tabloids for inspiration. Into his office steps a young man (García Bernal) who claims to be his old school friend and first love Ignacio Rodriguéz, bearing a screenplay that riffs on their abuse and separation at the hands of the predatory Father Manolo (Giménez-Cacho) at Catholic school during the repressive '60s, and the idea of revenge wrought during the country's liberated late-'70s knees-up. Enrique is tantalised, but as he delves into his visitor and his story, he finds that the priest's seeds of perfidy have born strange and terrible fruit. Packing the homoeroticism and masquerade of his early comedies with the sleek storytelling exuberance of his recent dramas, this teeming tragedy could be taken as an index of Almodóvar ministrations: transgression, provocation, compassion and flair. It's certainly his most ambitious film to date, an ever-shifting kaleidoscope in which identity, desire and power are in permanent disarray. But for García Bernal's quicksilver lucidity through a wild variety of guises, the film would lack any focus. As it is, it's too fractured to stoke clear empathy or steer to dramatic satisfaction. But maybe that's its point: life's end is nothing to live for. Best relish the convolutions of the journey.
— NB, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Pedro Almodovar's bold, Hitchcockian thriller in the VERTIGO (1958) vein — vivid colors and brittle cleverness wrapped around a dark, dark heart — makes provocative entertainment from material most filmmakers approach with solemn gravity. But rather than diminish the shattering consequences of abuse and betrayal, it situates them in a larger landscape of emotional fires in which personalities are forged, twisted and sometime destroyed. ... By turns enthralling, seductive and deeply disturbing, Almodovar's tragic fable is steeped in a swooning sense of passion's power to inspire, pervert and destroy that draws the fractured narrative into a satisfying whole.
— Maitland McDonagh, TV MovieGuide
•••••
From the Saul Bass-inspired opening credit sequence of peeling, layered billboard posters, Almodóvar evokes the densely layered cinema of Alfred Hitchchock to create a reverent, yet continuously inventive, exquisitely realized, and brilliantly modulated comic melodrama in Bad Education. Ostensibly a story about a filmmaker (Fele Martinez) suffering from a creative block (who, as the film begins has resorted to pinching potential ideas from salacious tabloid news articles) who is visited by a former schoolmate and choirboy - now a struggling actor and occasional hustler who now goes by the stage name Angel (Gael García Bernal) (and whose only experience is from an obscure, third rate acting troupe called The Bumblebees) - with a disturbingly sensational, semi-autobiographical story of his abuse in the hands of the schoolmaster Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez-Cacho), the film soon evolves into a deeply entangled tale of deception, closely guarded secrets, dubious allegiances, inscrutable motivation, and revenge. Richly (and ingeniously) told in intertwining realities of flashbacks, present day, and filmed re-enactments of Ignacio's deeply troubled life, the film achieves a delicate balance of tension, mystery, deception, and ambiguity (Zahara's introduction is through her performance of the song, Quizás, Quizás, Quizás). Recalling the decadence, creative process, and ambiguous and confused sexuality of Law of Desire, the film features Almodóvar's quintessentially bold, but elegant visual refinement, lush construction, tongue-in-cheek double entendres, surreal humor, and complex pulp narrative that have come to define his exhilarating, idiosyncratic cinema.
— Aquarello
•••••
Un ouragan narratif où, symptomatiquement, un scénario tient lieu de ciment (...) La force d'Almodovar, sa constance: une sobre manie du mythe qui fait de ses films d'insatiables usines esthétiques.
— François Bégaudeau, Cahiers du Cinéma
•••••
Simultaneously his safest, gayest, and most Fassbinderian movie to date, Bad Education is bald noir melodrama, a Mildred Pierce for trannies, tricked up with overlapping narratives and haunted by Catholic-school seaminess. ... Visually, Bad Education's only impressive set piece is the dynamic, Saul Bass-esque opening credits. (Unless you decide to count García Bernal as a special effect, in and out of heels.) Almodóvar has a ball fetishizing cross-dressing performance at length, but there's no attempt to plumb the chintzy, mock-sexual notion of showbiz "glamour" that fuels it.

Of course, duplicity in all its forms is the movie's cri de coeur and the masking of identity its pervasive trope. But Bad Education still manages to be fairly predictable, its contrivances and its insistent evocations of noir tradition illustrating only how much more comfortable Almodóvar is with one-eyed lust than with moral ambiguity. Hardly a social or even anti-clerical critique, the movie seems to blame the crimes of the present on the sins of the past, but the connections never get fleshed out. For all of the recycled sturm und drang around a fourth-act murder, the soup rarely reaches a boil—an offhand news story mentioned by Enrique, about a dead driver plowing straight across flatlands for miles while police try to stop the car, easily distracts us from the movie we're watching with a movie that might've been.
— Michael Atkinson, Village Voice
•••••
« Au début, c’est un peu un film de terreur, un récit gothique. Ensuite, c’est devenu l’histoire de deux frères, et j’ai alors pensé à Qu’est-il arrivé à Baby Jane ?, le film d’Aldrich. Puis, j’ai découvert le personnage de Berenguer, le prêtre défroqué, qui m’a conduit au film noir. En cherchant le personnage, je pensais aux héros des films de Jean-Pierre Melville, je le voyais sombre, profond, très masculin. L’image la plus forte était celle-ci : un homme très austère qui retrouve un de ses anciens élèves, qui est devenu une femme. Je le voyais lui donnant une dose d’héroïne pour le tuer, cette scène m’a guidé vers le personnage » (Pedro Almodóvar). Sur trois époques, les années 60, 70 et 80, l’histoire d’un cinéaste qui retrouve un camarade d’internat venu lui proposer de réaliser un film sur leurs premiers émois et les abus sexuel du père Manolo… La première fois aussi qu’Almodóvar aborde la pré-movida et un tabou de son cinéma, le franquisme.
— Cinémathèque Toulouse

Volver

(Volver - Zurückkehren [de])

Spain 2006
d: Pedro Almodóvar
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (Region 2 uk)

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In one of the most gorgeous images in ‘Volver’, white blossoms into crimson as a sheet of kitchen towel saturates with blood. Housework here is murder and a woman’s work is never done – not after killing, not even after dying. Almodóvar has long been interested in the varied terrain of ‘women’s troubles’ (as the film’s funniest line ambiguously describes them), and his sixteenth feature returns to many of the concerns of his fourth, 1984’s ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?’, offering another fable of long-suffering drudgery overcome by domestic homicide and the whiff of quotidian magic (and bodily odours). It’s one of several returns to which the title – meaning ‘coming back’ – refers, along with the road from Madrid to ancestral La Mancha, the irruption of the past into the present and Almodóvar’s professional reunion with Carmen Maura for the first time since ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ (1987).The story is at once hysterical and mundane, founded in abuse, rape, murder and corpse disposal yet ultimately about none of these so much as the endurance of those involved. Penélope Cruz steps into the pivotal role taken by Maura in ‘What Have I Done…’: her Raimunda is a working wife and mum holding down several jobs to support her adolescent daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo). She also makes regular trips back to her home village with her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) to tend their mother’s grave and visit their aged aunt (regular Almodóvar biddie Chus Lampreave). But when Raimunda’s husband suddenly dies and Sole starts receiving visitations from their mum (Maura), both have to learn to live with death and the practical as well as emotional challenges it brings.Looking back, Almodóvar’s career is extraordinarily cohesive, a decade-spanning conversation of images and emotions rendered through ever more sophisticated technique, especially in narrative terms: as always, he makes room here for jealousy and self-reinvention, shoes and hospitals, patterns and mirrors, embedded clips of classic films and pastiches of trash TV, but juxtaposes and frames them with more delicacy and grace than ever – it’s some achievement that the film is both funnier and more moving on repeated viewing, when its pervasive dramatic ironies emerge. Where the director’s earliest works alternated tragedy and farce, ‘Volver’ masterfully interpolates them: the absurd and the affecting rub along with marvellous, deceptive ease, recalling ‘The Trouble with Harry’ one minute, ‘Babette’s Feast’ the next. Vintage Magnani and Loren, meanwhile, are explicitly evoked in Cruz’s bravura performance.The construction of glamour (another perennial Almodóvar trope) lies at the root of the original sins blighting this family – sins played out in the mad desert garden of their home village. Almodóvar is a native of La Mancha himself and his characters’ return to the social womb has provoked various and complex emotions in his films. The village here is superstitious and somewhat alien – a funeral scene yields eerie, segregated scenes of silent, staring men and a hive of black-clad women awash in the buzz of prayer and clicking of fans – riven by a tearing wind that supposedly fuels insanity as well as ravenous fires. (The frequent shots of modern windmills bring to mind the region’s most famous and delusional scion, Don Quixote.)That the location proves to be restorative as well as traumatic is down to the air of sympathetic sisterhood embodied in the superb ensemble acting (Blanca Portillo is terrific as the sisters’ childhood friend). More even than ‘All About My Mother’, this is a world of absentee men and multi-tasking women unfettered by conventional expectations – including those of the genre narrative ‘Volver’ initially seems to offer. Time and again the expected development is described rather than shown, or finessed away entirely. The result is to bind us more closely to the characters than the plot in a testament to Almodóvar’s ideal – perhaps idealised – vision of female solidarity. If that kitchen towel shot turned housework into a fight for life, the gorgeous closing credit sequence makes the mundane miraculous, as patterns from the characters’ everyday clothes bloom into screen-filling beauty.
— Ben Walters, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Volver ingeniously opens to the title sequence illustrating a familiar All Souls Day ritual in a rural village in La Mancha, a solemn occasion when families visit the gravesites of their loved ones in a day of caretaking, remembrance, and homecoming, as sisters Sole (Lola Dueñas) and Raimunda (Penélope Cruz), along with Raimunda's adolescent daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo, who coincidentally appeared in Carlos Saura's The Seventh Day, a film that also chronicles the repercussions of unraveling buried secrets in a small town), tend to the graves of their parents before paying a visit to their dotty aunt (Chus Lampreave), an ailing elderly woman who continues to live alone in the family home (under the watchful eye of a concerned neighbor named Augustina (Blanca Portillo)), even as the trauma of her beloved sister, Irene's (Carmen Maura) death has confined her to the memories of an eternal past present. This commemorative ritual that implicitly acknowledges the coexistence of the living with the dead provides an incisive prefiguration to the unforeseen complications befall the sisters after their return from La Mancha, as Raimunda's unemployed husband (Antonio de la Torre)'s transgressive impulses threaten to wreck their already tenuous relationship, and Sole returns home to find that the ghost of their mother had stowed away in the trunk of her car. Pedro Almodóvar's incomparable eye for detail and delightfully subversive dark humor suits his recurring paean to the strength, resilience, communality, nurturing, intuitiveness, and ennobled beauty of women especially well, from the neorealist-inspired working class clothing worn by Raimunda that nevertheless, exuded irrepressible sensuality (evoking the wardrobe of iconic actress Sophia Loren), to the image of Anna Magnani made immortal by late night television rebroadcasts, and especially to the metaphoric image of the Manchegan windmills that literally harness the collective energy of the elusive, enduring - and perhaps even a bit maddening - winds that blow across the rural landscape of this enigmatic town of secretive, superstitious, surviving women that visually reinforces the film's theme of return and eternal cycles.
— Acquarello
•••••
Crammed with outrageous turns of fortune and quicksilver shifts in tone, Almodovar's film is held together by performances so subtle and complex it's hard to single out only one as exceptional. But Cruz is astonishing, playing Raimunda as loyal, capable and fiercely protective of her loved ones, but also short-tempered and quick with a wounding word; her impromptu performance of the ballad "Volver," which she last sang as an aspiring child actress, sums up a lifetime of longing, defiance, regret and hope in a few thrilling minutes.
— Maitland McDonagh, TV MovieGuide
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Von einem Gardel-Lied hat der Film seinen Titel, das die ganze Melancholie des Tangos aufs wunderbarste beschwört: "Heimkehren mit einem verwitterten Gesicht, der Schnee der Zeit hat meine Schläfen gebleicht und weiß gemacht. Spüren... dass das Leben ein Windstoß ist, dass zwanzig Jahre nichts sind, dass der fiebrige Blick, der durch den Schatten wandert, nach dir ausschaut und dich nennt..." Pedro Almodóvar geht mit seiner Heldin Raimunda noch einmal zurück nach La Mancha, in die Zeit der Kindheit, ins Land der Mütter. Ins Don-Quijote-Reich, wo die Windräder sich noch drehen, aber nun als ein Zeichen von Dynamik und Fortschritt, ein Instrument der Energiegewinnung. Man kann beim Wort "Volver" auch an eine Wende denken, an eine Revolution, in den Beziehungen der Menschen, in der Geschichte der Menschheit.
Der menschlichen Travestie, der Travestie als Lebensform, wie sie Almodóvar in fünfzehn Filmen feierte, gibt dieser Film eine neue Dimension - indem er ein Fortleben nach dem Tode zeigt und das Leben als eine Form des Todes. Raimundas Mutter kehrt zurück, Carmen Maura, und sie bringt Zersetzung mit sich, in allen Formen, von ihren Fürzen bis zur Transzendenz. "Volver" ist ein freies Remake von Marnie, eine schöne kleine Studie über Eltern und Kinder, über die Pflicht der Eltern, über die Kinder zu wachen, und die Pflicht der Kinder, diesem Schutz ein Ende zu setzen, und die Schrecken, vor denen die Eltern die Kinder nicht bewahren können und die sie selber ihnen antun...
Ein Freund, so erzählt Almodóvar in seinen Produktionstagebüchern, der Autor Juanjo Millás, sei zu den Dreharbeiten zu "Volver" gekommen, und habe ihn gefragt, ob dieser neue Film inspiriert sei von dem Buch "Pedro Páramo" - dem Meisterwerk von Juan Rulfo, das nur ein Thema, eine Obsession kennt: die Frage, wie die Lebenden und die Toten eine Form der Koexistenz haben. Der mexikanische Furor und der Furor von La Mancha, Almodóvar war verwirrt und begeistert. Das unerbittliche Feuer, der brennende Wind, die Trübsal, die Rulfo wie kein anderer erlebt haben muss: "Und wenn Sie wollen, können Sie diese Trübsal sehen, wann immer Sie wollen. Der Wind wirbelt sie auf, aber er weht sie niemals fort. Dort bleibt sie, als wäre sie dort auf die Welt gekommen. Und man kann sie schmecken und fühlen, weil sie immer über einem ist und eng an einen gepresst und weil sie beklemmend ist wie ein großes Kataplasma auf dem bloßen Herzen."
— Fritz Göttler, Schnitt
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"Volver" est l'une des oeuvres les plus accomplies de Pedro Almodovar. L'une de ses qualités les plus évidentes réside (...) dans la perfection de son scénario.
— Positif, Yann Tobin
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On dirait qu’avec ce titre Pedro Almodovar a voulu indiquer un virage déjà amorcé par Parle avec Elle et La Mauvaise Education : débrayage, recentrement autour de la narration, nouvelle austérité (…). Tout va très vite, propulsé par l'énergie et le beau coffre de Raimunda. Mais il y a partout du lest pour qu'on sente mieux l'envol, l'effort et le plaisir du transport (...).
— Cahiers du Cinéma, Emmanuel Burdeau