No Room for Men in La Mancha

The message of more than a few movies is that you can always go home in some fashion.

But in Pedro Almodóvar’s excellent film "Volver," that homecoming is literal.

"Volver" is Spanish for return.

To top it off, the film is set in Almodóvar’s hometown, the parched and windy La Mancha, Spain. Although Almodóvar has lived in Madrid for the last 30 years, "Volver" is his tribute to the provincial (and Catholic) upbringing in a town where the past is as important as the present. The question is which will win.

In the film’s first scene, we watch as Raimunda (played by Penélope Cruz with raccoon eyes) dusts her parents’ headstone. The two died in a fire years ago, but it’s no surprise when Mom (Carmen Marua, the leading lady of early Almodóvar, returning after 18 years) reappears at an aunt’s funeral. The surprise is that she does so pretending to be a ghost. One minute she’s sighted by the neighbors; the next she’s asking to be let out of the trunk of a car.

"It takes a lot out of you," Mom says to her other daughter, Sole (Lola Deuñas), by way of explanation.

Raimunda has her own problems, though. In interviews for the film, Almodóvar has described "Volver" as his nod to "Arsenic and Old Lace." That’s true, in the sense that both make quick with the bodies. In the 1944 Cary Grant film, murder was dispatched by poison in a cup of afternoon tea. In "Volver," it’s a knife in the stomach of Raiumnda’s husband, Paco, as he tries to rape their teenage daughter. Raimunda, who works a series of low-paying jobs to support Paco’s couch-sitting soccer-watching, gives her husband a cool burial. Poor Paco. First the fridge, then a swamp.

There seems to be no room for men in La Mancha. When asked by a neighbor about the thumbprint of blood on her neck, Raimunda shrugs. "Women’s trouble," she says.

For her role, Cruz has been nominated for an Oscar though she is only one reason among several to see "Volver," which was released two months ago. I have always felt cool about Cruz; in her English-speaking roles, the actress has talked and moved as though she were made of wood. No doubt it was the translation. In Spanish, Cruz is equal parts salt and earth, in the way that Americans secretly wish all actors — not just the Mediterranean ones — to be.

With her husband out of the way, Raimunda takes a life as a not-on-the-books restaurateur, enlisting the help of a local hooker. Not a note of cattiness disrupts the enterprise. So, too, with the mother. In American movies, ghosts have long nails and look like rag pickers. Here, the ghost is helpful and flatulent, her case of gas a hint that she’s not what she appears to be. Almodóvar’s crush on women is undisguised and "Volver" actually looks like a valentine: full of peppermint stripes and cherry lips and cars that look like candied apples. (Compare Almodóvar’s La Mancha to the stomach-upsetting Spain of "Pan’s Labyrinth," a picture with enough SHKLIK and SHKLORTCHes to fill an entire issue of Mad Magazine.)

The director’s control over mood is deceiving. The early hints of discord — Mom’s return from the Land of the Dead, or at the very least, a missing persons’ poster; Raimunda’s pushiness; Sole’s loneliness — settle into Almodóvar’s gentle camp, half a dream of a Spanish-language soap. And when a series of sudden and damning revelations crowd the last half-hour of the film, we’re made to wonder at the rush.