All About Their Mother

Volver concerns a group of such females—Madrid-dwelling sisters Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) and Sole (Lola Duenas), Raimunda's teenage daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo), and family friend Agustina (Blanca Portillo)—who gather in their home village in La Mancha (Almodovar's childhood home as well, and complete with updated windmills) just before the siblings' frail aunt passes away. It's a fraught time: Raimunda and Sole's mother and father have only recently died in a fire, and the ailing Agustina's mother disappeared around the same time. Back home, Raimunda holds her horny, slovenly husband, Paco (Antonio de la Torre), in contempt, and all hell breaks loose when he subsequently attempts to find carnal fulfillment with Paula. As Raimunda deals with the messy aftermath of Paula's rebuttal, Sole is forced to attend their aunt's funeral in La Mancha, where she makes a shocking discovery: the sisters' mother, Irene (Carmen Maura), has seemingly returned from the dead and is haunting the family home.

Liberation inevitably eschews bourgeois means in Almodovar's oeuvre, and Volver is no exception. The newly manless Raimunda takes over a neighborhood restaurant left in her care for the off-season and, with Paula's help, turns it into a booming business—not to mention a handy temporary hiding place for a corpse. (In a self-reflexive note, the eatery's first customers are members of a film crew shooting in the region.) Meanwhile, Irene returns to Madrid with Sole and, disguised as a Russian immigrant, assists her daughter in the illegal hair salon she runs out of her apartment. Raimunda is the last to discover her mother's presence, and their eventual reconciliation reveals a whopper of a secret that solves more than one of the film's many mysteries.

No dour neorealist, Almodovar tempers Volver's darker, weepier elements with a buoyant touch, and while fans of his more full-tilt offerings may feel cheated, others will find the extra breathing room refreshing. For one thing, it makes it easier to fully appreciate the film's wonderful ensemble performances. Cruz's gale-force Mamma Hispania transformation is something to behold, from her Sophia Loren-esque bosom, over which much is made both visually and verbally, to her now-legendary prosthetic ass-padding, which seems to come and go at will. Maura is equally formidable and bears the brunt of the story's anguish with grace and good humor, while the lovely Duenas does a commendable impression of a dowdy, perpetually bewildered "right sourpuss."

Volver is doomed to be classified as a women's film, and the tag more or less fits in a self-conscious sense (Almodovar tips his hand in a late scene by showing Irene watching Anna Magnani on a TV broadcast of Luchino Visconti's Bellissima), as well as in the sense that it's uncommon to see so many competent onscreen female characters thriving without male counterparts (name the last American movie that came within a mile of that premise). But while its frank, laser-precision waltz of secrets and lies, trade-offs and comeuppances and comebacks and permanent disappearances may appeal—or at least be marketed—to a niche audience, it also represents a cathartic fantasy for grown-up troubled kids of all kinds. What, after all, could be more emotionally satisfying than discovering an estranged parent back from the beyond to offer a second chance at making things right?