The actress Penelope Cruz (pictured here) is the best thing about Volver, Eyewear believes. Pedro Almodovar's latest Cannes-winning vanity project (each of his films is a homage to his own sensibility sustained by self-reflecting lenses) may be his best, in that the mise-en-scene, while ravishing (especially the hot reds and cool blues) is never entirely overwhelmed by camp.Instead, a humane, and sober, web of intrigue, spun from the themes of incest, murder, hauntings and mother-love, creates a moving and thrilling picture, which plays on the style of TV sit-coms and soaps, while never entirely descending into laff-riot comedy or bathos.
Almodovar has never been my favourite director; he is my least favourite, of a generation of major auteurs that includes Lynch, Ozon and Wong Kar-wai. I am not merely aping Sight & Sound (whose recent issue asks whether PA is over-rated): indeed, I have avoided reading the article until after this post is done, so as not be influenced unduly.
What has always been his major failing is his strength - a visual sense drenched in a certain regard for older cinema. His signature has always been colour, style, passion and melodrama - usually associated with "great roles for women" (so long as women want to portray mothers and whores). PA flatters and idealizes women (and in the world of film this is sadly often called love), much as Hitchcock demonized and idealized them - driven by tired sexual tropes and desires that nonetheless achieve force when rendered as film.
Another way of saying this is that PA's movies yearn for a sentimental golden-age of film (and life) and do so by use of shallow homage and scene-quotation that is about as deep as pastiche always is.
Volver is more mature than this. The homage is still there (to Psycho, especially, although the colour is more North by Northwest - and Visconti) but the story - a touching ensemble-piece that explores the return of the repressed, as a literal figure, or figures - reveals moments of genuine pathos, psychological insight. It opens with wind, dust and gravestones in a tour-de-force shot worthy of Welles, and terminates with a sombre final act that (in a world without men) credibly restores the possibility of redemption, of heaven, on earth, as simply respectful agape among one gender.
I sometimes felt, while watching Volver, that PA is trying to fuse the colour of late Hitchcock and the existential shadows of Bergman; it is a measure of his stylish mastery that he has come close.
Four specs out of five.
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