Volver, which can be translated as “To Return” to English, houses many different acts of “returning” during its runtime. We witness Almadovar’s return to his village La Mancha where he spent his childhood. We also witness his return to the female perspective, where whispers from “All About My Mother”  echoe, by focusing on the rituals of women in La Mancha and their relationships with eachother. After the noir solemnity of “Bad Education”, Almadovar also returns to comedy.

Gizem Yarbil

The people who follow Pedro Almadovar’s work feel that they are in a very familiar, warm and comfortable place every time they watch one of the director’s movies. These movies, in which vivid colors, especially red, blaze on the screen with all their passion and characters don’t hesitate to share their most intimate secrets with us and make us feel as if we’ve known them for years, are like the occupants of a familiar shelter that the director’s followers habitually revisit. Actually, these movies are self-conscious about being movies after all. However, even this self-consciousness does not inhibit us from completely indulging inside their world as if they are real. Even if dead people are resuscitated or huge tragedies are turned into comedies via absurd series of events, as in the example of Volver, everything in Almadovar movies make themselves be embraced as authentic by the viewers. We get disappointed when they end. We even start to miss the characters. Therefore, watching a new Almadovar movie is like reliving different versions of the same dream, or returning back to that familiar and warm shelter we’ve visited for years.
Volver, which can be translated as “To Return” to English, houses many different acts of “returning” during its runtime. We witness Almadovar’s return to his village La Mancha where he spent his childhood. We also witness his return to the female perspective, where whispers from “All About My Mother”  echoe, by focusing on the rituals of women in La Mancha and their relationships with eachother. After the noir solemnity of “Bad Education”, Almadovar also returns to comedy. However, the return that will probably excite the early followers of Almadovar the most would be the return of that familiar face from “The Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown”, the face of Carmen Maura. The actress returns to an Almadovar set after 17 years. However we see a more mysterious and supernatural return in this movie where Irene, Maura’s character, returns from the land of the dead as if confirming a superstitious belief held by the women of La Mancha, and even many others in the world.

In the opening scene of the movie, we see the women of La Mancha clean their mothers’ graves while a violent wind is blowing. As far as Almadovar can remember, it is a common and highly valued tradition for the women of La Mancha to visit the graves of their mothers, clean them and even put their own graves in order if they have been reserved beforehand. In this scene, Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) and Sole (Lola Duenas) visit the grave of their mother, Irene, whom they lost in a fire and do the necessary cleanups. From the beginning of the movie, Penelope Cruz starts to portray a strong, agile and resourceful character who manages to succeed easily in every task while radiating a beam of light and energy without even being aware of it. Although her character has to face absurd and tragic events that an ordinary woman would not easily encounter, Cruz never breaks out of her skillful and powerful character. Although she portrays a strong woman who stands firmly on her feet and runs to the help of everyone, Cruz manages to inject her innate fragility into this character with remarkable talent and naturalness and displays what maybe her best performance in her acting career.  
Almadovar, who grew up hearing ghost stories in La Mancha, gets his inspiration from a superstitious belief held by the women of the village and brings back Irene, the mother of Raimunda and Sole, from the occult land of death, which is the director’s biggest fear. This superstitious belief that is embedded in but ignored by many of us, shows its power and causes us to accept the character of Irene as a ghost. By doing this, Almadovar plays with not only the superstitious nature of the women of La Mancha but also the superstition of the viewers. Death loses its dreadful and terrifying identity in Volver and gets reduced to its true identity of being just another natural consequence in life by getting blended with the unique comedic approach of Almadovar. The director says that with this movie, he overcame his fear of death by going back to the village he spent his childhood at and gained his peace of mind after looking back at and rethinking about his childhood memories. It might be the comfort and serenity born by the supernaturalness of life we see in Volver that caused Almadovar to gain his peace of mind. Just like the women of La Mancha who find comfort and ease by believing in superstitions, Almadovar finds his solace by accepting death with all its reality and sometimes making fun of it. We can see the traces of the director’s peace within himself in the comedic atmosphere he creates against the serious and frightful nature of death.
 
Like “All About My Mother”, Volver is dedicated to the friendship, solidarity and emotional connections between women. It is one of the most captivating stories of Almadovar that is devoted to the relationships between mothers, daughters, sisters and the emotional bonding between all women. The most valid thing in this place, where dead people resurrect and the east wind drives people to the verge of going insane, is that these bonds reveal themselves with great vitality in every frame of the movie. These women, who won this year’s Best Actress Award in Cannes Film Festival as an ensemble, display an extraordinary performance as inseparable pieces of the emotional bond they create on the big screen. Almadovar, the director who can understand women better than women can understand each other, revisits melancholy, drama and tragedy from the perspective of women, again with his unique passion, again amidst the most vivid colors and again with a comedic angle we desparately need and love. Almadovar invites his audience once again to the familiar land we all feel that we belong to.