Amid life and death
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Pedro Almodóvar's acclaimed film, Volver, was screened at the Suchitra Bengalooru International Film Festival. Death is the leitmotif of Volver, but the film is far from being morbid
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WONDERFUL PARADOX Volver uses the colour red to highlight the vitality of life
Pedro Almodóvar's latest film, Volver (Coming Back) is anything but a ghost story. It is all about human beings. More particularly about ordinary, working class women. Women who kiss each other rather noisily.
"Listen to the kissing," writes Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. "That is my advice to anyone watching the start of Volver... We have a gaggle of women, young and old, exchanging pecks on the cheek that they sound like rifle shots. This small excess proves that Almodóvar is still crazy after all these years."
Volvertook Pedro six long years to write. The film was premiered on March 10, 2006, in Puertollano, Spain, and has since made waves. Although it missed out on the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival Almodovar won the award for best screenplay. The Best Actress Award went not just to Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura, but also for four other main actresses (Lola Dueñas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo and Chus Lampreave).
The 121-minute film may not be in the same class as Pedro's earlier works like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1987), All about my Mother (1999) or Talk to Her (2002); but is nevertheless a fiercely engrossing tale of three generations of women who — caught in an intricate web of complex relationships, private dreams, and collective destiny — manage to "survive the east wind, fire, insanity, superstition and even death by means of goodness, lies and boundless vitality."
The film opens with some hectic activity at a cemetery on a windy morning where a group of women are engaged in cleaning and decorating the headstones; it ends with the "ghost with watering eyes" (Irene) making up with her dearest daughter (Raimunda) and proceeding to take care of a dying, lonely spinster, Agustina (Blanca Portillo).
In between, the fast-paced Spanish drama includes episodes of child abuse, murder, cancer, corpse disposal, a ghost hiding below a cot and a village obsessed with the dead.
"That's the wonderful paradox of Volver," writes David Ansen in Newsweek. "It flows effortlessly between peril and poignancy, the real and the surreal, even life and death. At the centre of almost every scene of this bold, warm movie is a splash of red — a purse, a pepper, a car, a blood-soaked paper napkin, a dress — the colour of passion, mortality, the heart. Almodóvar's generous vision isn't just unique, it's colour-coordinated."
Pedro himself considers Volver to be a pop comedy ("at least a dramatic comedy, because there are tears in all my comedies and laughs in all my dramas") and a false local film that involves a drama with surrealist elements. "It isn't a horror film," he declares, "but some characters inhabit the darkness within the houses, the dim back rooms, it is an intimate story but with so much action that it seems like a domestic Indiana Jones'... There is death all along the story, but this is not a mournful film. I admire mainly the daily nature of death for little towns like mine, the way they humanize its rituals.
In Volver, death does not mean terror or "berlanguian" comedy. It will be shown with respect and fidelity towards my childhood memories... .
Anyway, everything in Volver is fiction. But the best way to tell a fiction (at least in my case) is to dress it with reality. Reality and fiction come together without confusion."
GIRIDHAR KHASNIS
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