Volver Review

'Volver' means 'to return' or 'coming back' in Spanish and, fittingly, director Pedro Almodóvar's sixteenth feature revisits many of the themes and ideas that fans of his rich melodramas have come to love. As with many of his films, women, whether on the verge of a nervous breakdown or not, dominate. Volver is all about Almodóvar's mothers, sisters and daughters, his overwhelming respect for their defiance of life's travails and feckless men.

The film also marks the return of former muse Carmen Maura, making her first appearance for Almodóvar in some 17 years. What this expert blend of surreal fantasy, buoyant comedy and poignant drama clearly isn't, though, is a return to form. Almodóvar's been at the top of his game for around a decade now, effortlessly reeling off work of the highest quality. In that sense, Volver is more continuation than revival.

Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) is a feisty, working-class Madrid wife and mother, supporting her unemployed husband and adolescent daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo), while clashing with her older sister, hairdresser Sole (Lola Dueñas), and still finding the time to care for elderly ailing aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave), still resident in the family's small Manchegan home village. The eastern wind that blows through town is said to cause the region's high rate of insanity and also fanned the flames that took Raimunda and Sole's parents lives in a house fire years earlier.

In rapid progression, Raimunda's world is shaken. Aunt Paula dies, though the village women seem nonchalantly convinced that Raimunda's dead mother Irene had been helping Paula through her final days. Closer to home, Raimunda discovers that her daughter Paula has been regularly abused by her father and stabbed him to death in self-defence. Now Raimunda has to deal with the disposal of one dead body and the possible resurrection of another.