You'll need a scorecard to keep track of all the folks making their way homeward in Volver, Pedro Almodóvar's latest and most affecting tribute to the beauty, resilience and compassion of all womankind. His title, taken from a ballad performed midway through the film, is the Spanish infinitive "to return," and the narrative involves two sisters, Raimunda (Penélope
Cruz) and Sole (Lola Dueñas), whose lives are thrown into (further) disarray by the spectral appearance of their late mother, looking bedraggled and apologetic. That the ghost is played by Carmen Maura, who hasn't worked with Almodóvar since 1988's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, constitutes another reunion; furthermore, a good hunk of the movie takes place in La Mancha, the director's provincial hometown. And then there's Cruz's belated return to respectability after several misguided years spent as Hollywood's generic Latina eye candy.
Despite all this relaxed familiarity, Volver throbs with a subterranean passion that precludes lazy nostalgia. (Not for nothing does the spectral mom spend most of her time hiding underneath the bed.) Both cheerfully ludicrous and infinitely tender, the movie — which manages to squeeze in a knife murder, two incestuous relationships, a mysterious fire, and an impromptu catering business — flits between farce and melodrama with more assurance and less self-consciousness than any other film of Almodóvar's so-called "mature period." Opening with a magnificent lateral tracking shot across a windswept La Mancha cemetery, as the bereaved diligently polish and adorn headstones like purgatory's maids, it gracefully explores the sway that the dead hold over the living, without ever sacrificing the sheer ebullience and vibrancy that make Pedro's work pop.
Is it ultimately a bit slight, as a few grumpy holdouts have charged? Only if you're prepared to ignore the haunting, eerie beauty of its final shot, which serves as compassionate counterpoint to that of The Sweet Hereafter.
Egoyan's film insists that certain wounds can never be healed. Almodóvar respectfully begs to differ.
— Mike D'Angelo
