![]() ![]() But when Raimunda’s husband suddenly dies and Sole starts receiving visitations from their mum (Maura), both have to learn to live with death and the practical as well as emotional challenges it brings.Looking back, Almodóvar’s career is extraordinarily cohesive, a decade-spanning conversation of images and emotions rendered through ever more sophisticated technique, especially in narrative terms: as always, he makes room here for jealousy and self-reinvention, shoes and hospitals, patterns and mirrors, embedded clips of classic films and pastiches of trash TV, but juxtaposes and frames them with more delicacy and grace than ever – it’s some achievement that the film is both funnier and more moving on repeated viewing, when its pervasive dramatic ironies emerge. She also makes regular trips back to her home village with her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) to tend their mother’s grave and visit their aged aunt (regular Almodóvar biddie Chus Lampreave). ![]() ![]() Penélope Cruz steps into the pivotal role taken by Maura in ‘What Have I Done…’: her Raimunda is a working wife and mum holding down several jobs to support her adolescent daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo). It’s one of several returns to which the title – meaning ‘coming back’ – refers, along with the road from Madrid to ancestral La Mancha, the irruption of the past into the present and Almodóvar’s professional reunion with Carmen Maura for the first time since ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ (1987).The story is at once hysterical and mundane, founded in abuse, rape, murder and corpse disposal yet ultimately about none of these so much as the endurance of those involved. Almodóvar has long been interested in the varied terrain of ‘women’s troubles’ (as the film’s funniest line ambiguously describes them), and his sixteenth feature returns to many of the concerns of his fourth, 1984’s ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?’, offering another fable of long-suffering drudgery overcome by domestic homicide and the whiff of quotidian magic (and bodily odours). ![]() Housework here is murder and a woman’s work is never done – not after killing, not even after dying. In one of the most gorgeous images in ‘Volver’, white blossoms into crimson as a sheet of kitchen towel saturates with blood. ![]()
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