![]() The film's Spanish premiere was held on 10 March 2006 in Puertollano, where the filming had taken place. It received critical acclaim and ultimately won two awards at the festival, for Best Actress (shared by the six main actresses) and Best Screenplay. Volver premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or. Set in the La Mancha region, Almodóvar's place of birth, the filmmaker cited his upbringing as a major influence on many aspects of the plot and the characters. Drawing inspiration from the Italian neorealism of the late 1940s to early 1950s and the work of pioneering directors such as Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Volver addresses themes like sexual abuse, loneliness and death, mixing the genres of farce, tragedy, melodrama, and magic realism. The plot originates in Almodóvar's earlier film The Flower of My Secret (1995), where it features as a novel which is rejected for publication but is stolen to form the screenplay of a film named The Freezer. To top off the family crisis, her mother Irene returns from the dead to tie up loose ends. Revolving around an eccentric family of women from a wind-swept region south of Madrid, Cruz stars as Raimunda, a working-class woman forced to go to great lengths to protect her 14-year-old daughter Paula. The film features an ensemble cast that includes Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo, and Chus Lampreave. In the movie's final moments, the act of remembrance and healing comes full circle as Janis's makeshift new family gathers to honour those lost, and present dissolves into past.Volver ( Spanish pronunciation:, meaning "to go back") is a 2006 Spanish comedy-drama film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. (In the time since the film was made, a new Democratic Memory Law has been put forward and funding has been renewed.) The handsome forensic archaeologist father of Janis's child, Arturo (Israel Elejalde), happens to be a member of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), a real-life organisation that collects testimonies from families and communities, and works to excavate and identify bodies - filling a gap left by insufficient government funding. The biggest surprise, though, lies in the way the film links this tale of two mothers to one of a country confronting the truth of its past in particular, the estimated 114,000 people killed in the Spanish Civil War's White Terror whose whereabouts are still unknown today.Įarly on, we learn that Janis's great-grandfather was taken in the night by fascists her late grandmother asked her to help exhume his body from an unmarked mass grave and give him a proper burial. "With a look, know how the other one is feeling that morning … I can never lie to him," Penélope Cruz told EW. The domestic tale closely orbits two women, photographer Janis (Cruz) and the teenage Ana (newcomer Milena Smit), who meet when they give birth to daughters in the same ward on the same day.īoth are single mothers: by Janis's hospital bedside is her riotous best friend Elena (Almodóvar favourite Rossy de Palma) Ana's only support is her distant, prim and proper actress mother Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón).Īs if cosmically ensnaring their fates, the synchronised births mean the two women form a bond and then look to each other as they negotiate life's unexpected turns and twists. Most of Parallel Mothers takes place inside a modernist Madrid apartment filled with books and art, and decked out in red panelling and aquamarine tiles, which could easily be mistaken for Almodóvar's own pad. Populated by ungovernable women, the LGBTQ+ community, singers, filmmakers, nuns who drop acid, and several future Hollywood stars, they conjured an exuberant alternate vision of Spain.įour decades on, that hot-blooded irreverence has cooled into twilight melancholy – most sublimely, 2019's Pain and Glory – though the 72-year-old hasn't lost any of his spirit, or his love for eye-popping production design. Pedro Almodóvar told the New York Times in 1988: "Each time I begin a new movie, I try to imagine how the story would go if Franco had never existed." ( Supplied: Sony Pictures)
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