>>PREVIEW
VOLVER
STARRING: Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura and Blanca Portillo
DIRECTED BY: Pedro Almodóvar
Opens Friday, December 22
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Now routinely lionized as one of the world’s great filmmakers, Pedro Almodóvar comports himself with much more dignity than he did when he was more interested in playing the role of Spanish cinema’s enfant terrible. Yet he can’t resist a moment of immodesty when asked to name the best quality of his Volver star Penélope Cruz.
"Me," says the director. When the laughter subsides, he clarifies his answer. "She did it, of course – it’s her body, her face, her tears. What I mean by that joke is I provoke that. I explained to her every word and every meaning – everything that is between the lines. We spent a lot of time preparing this work. But it’s also because of her and her generosity. If she didn’t have this disposition, to give all the time that I wanted, the result would be very different. She works with me in a different way than she is used to with Hollywood directors. But this is the way that I work and it suits her very well."
Volver marks the third collaboration between Almodóvar and Cruz after 1997’s Live Flesh and 1999’s All About My Mother. This time, the director specifically tailored the film as a showcase for the star. Padding out her backside for the occasion, Cruz is tough, funny and magnetic as Raimunda, a housewife who is doubly plagued by the inconvenient presence of a corpse in her freezer and the arrival of the ghost of her mother (Carmen Maura). Though longtime fans of the director may wish the pacing wasn’t so casual compared to the frantic comedies he made with Maura in the ’80s, Almodóvar proves his mastery over the material by knitting the many disparate plot strands into a moving melodrama that celebrates the strength of women and of Cruz in particular.
Almodóvar believes that by giving Cruz a character who is so different than most of her roles, he has brought out the best in her. "I’m very glad that she is superb in this movie because it’s also my movie," he says. Cruz is eager to pay back the compliments. "His movies will make history," she says in another interview. "He’s that good."
She believes their collaboration was made possible by their long friendship. It’s also obvious that she regards him as a father figure. "I always want him to be happy on set," she says. "That’s why I’m always scared of him. He is very demanding and very honest. If something is going well, you can see, and if it’s not going well, you can see, too. He’s not mean to me, but I respect him so much and he gives me these amazing opportunities with these characters. I never want to disappoint him."
She even admits to crying the day before they started shooting Volver. "I like it," she says with a laugh. "If it can make you cry out of fear, you are giving everything to that project and almost obsessed by it. I like working that way."
Volver is a very personal project for Almodóvar as well, emerging from his memories of the "strong women" who surrounded him in his childhood in La Mancha. He was surprised to realize how much both the people and the place had influenced him – indeed, those things are hard to separate.
"To go back to La Mancha was to go back to my mother," he says. "Not like a memory but a landscape, like a place. I was thinking about my mother like a place where you lived and you can stay. So it was incredibly moving. Even more than moving – it gave me a kind of inner peace that I never felt before during shooting, which is usually something very crazy. Just being in the same places that she lived and I lived when I was a child, it was a journey into something I didn’t expect. That was very healing to me."
Following two more guy-centric stories in Talk to Her and Bad Education, Volver is perhaps most remarkable as a testament to the filmmaker’s forte with female characters. That quality was acknowledged at Cannes when the film’s cast shared a collective award for best actress. Cruz – who’s an easy bet for an Oscar nod – rightly appreciates it, too.
"He loves women," she says, "and he can write for women of any generation. There are women in this movie who are 60 and 80 and the movie works. This movie doesn’t need explosions or only 18-year-old girls with big tits. It has substance and a story that can touch people’s hearts and minds. He’s an example that that is possible." |
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