Ladies Man

Working relationship: Volver filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, left, and actor Penélope Cruz. (Emilio Pereda/El Deseo/Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

The title of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film is Volver. It’s Spanish for “return,” which is as much a reflection of several plot twists as it is on the auteur himself: a resumption of female concerns after the male-focused Bad Education and Talk To Her; a revisiting of his sleepy childhood home of La Mancha; a reunion with his longtime muse Carmen Maura after an 18-year estrangement; and a resurrection of a genre rarely made since the golden age of Hollywood — the women’s weepie.

The chief weeper in Volver is Penélope Cruz, and the tears do pool prettily in her black-liner rimmed eyes. As Raimunda, a luscious, working-class drudge in Madrid, she has plenty to cry about. There’s her feckless husband, who’s recently begun ogling their teenaged daughter. And back in her home village in La Mancha, where Raimunda and her skittish, squirrel-like sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) visit and tend to their senile aunt (Chus Lampreave), their dead mother (Maura) has apparently risen from her well-cared-for grave to make peace with her daughter.

A devotee of classic Hollywood — Billy Wilder is one of his favourite directors — Almodóvar calls Volver “a meeting of Arsenic and Old Lace and Mildred Pierce.” The men in Volver are either louts or inconsequential; the central love story is between mothers and daughters — a subject he previously tackled in High Heels — and this tender, funny tribute to female audacity won a collective best actress award for its cast at the Cannes Film Festival in May. There’s a telling scene in which Raimunda answers a neighbour’s knock on the door with a smear of blood on her neck (she’s been trying to dispose of a body). When the neighbour points it out, she shrugs it off by saying, “women’s trouble” — an apt description of not just this film, but of Almodóvar’s leitmotif.

“Pedro loves women, he is very curious about the way we think, the way we feel,” Cruz says, during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where the film had its North American premiere. “He finds us complicated and he likes that complication.”

Raimunda (Penélope Cruz, right) is comforted by her mother Irene (Carmen Maura) in Volver. (Emilio Pereda/El Deseo/Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

It’s true that despite discovering Antonio Banderas and helping establish the career of Javier Bardem, Almodóvar remains best known as a director of women — likely because his muses have been so varied, so messy and so memorable. There have been famous beauties like Victoria Abril and Cruz, but the director is equally fascinated by older, less glamorous women. The delightful Lampreave, who’s been in several of his films, was in her fifties when he first cast her. And then there’s Rossy de Palma, an Almodóvar staple. In Toronto with Cruz for Volver’s gala presentation, the Madrid-based director says of the Modigliana-featured de Palma: “I love expressive faces. Camera beauty is not the regular kind of beauty. And the way the camera chooses faces is very mysterious.”

With a sensibility that draws equally from gay culture, screwball comedies, film noir and his family’s Mediterranean Catholicism, the director’s vision of womanhood is at once profane and worshipful. Talk To Her (2002) has a strangely sweet film-within-a-film sequence in which a man the size of a toy soldier crawls inside his lover’s vagina hoping to pleasure her for eternity. And in Volver, there’s an adoring, lingering overhead shot of Cruz at the kitchen sink, a large crucifix resting on her gloriously displayed bosom. That’s an Almodóvar heroine in a nutshell: the Venus of Willendorf in a cheap push-up bra.

Having vowed to work with Almodóvar since she saw Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (1990) when she was a teenager, Cruz won a brief but unforgettable role seven years later in Live Flesh (1997) as a prostitute who gives birth on a bus. (In keeping with this Madonna-whore theme, Cruz played a pregnant nun with AIDS in Almodóvar’s All About My Mother in 1999.) The director, she says, “is not just an important person for my career, but one of the most important people in my life.”

Almodóvar relies on that kind of devotion from his actors, who trust him even as their characters enter dark, morally complicated places. “I love that Pedro takes risks,” Cruz says. “He knows that you can do it before you know you can.” But in the past, Almodóvar’s tempestuousness has caused him problems. When the subject of 2004’s Bad Education is raised, he makes an allusion to the famously troubled production of Apocalypse Now. Almodóvar was plagued with self-doubt and reportedly clashed with star Gael Garcia Bernal during the filming. As for his falling out with Maura, he told the Guardian earlier in 2006 that it was due to “typical problems of working so intensely. We were a couple — an artistic couple, you understand — and such things happen.”

Speaking through a translator in a luxe Toronto hotel room, an older, wiser Almodóvar — his poof of hair is now more salt than pepper — is conscious of the power he wields over his stars. “Penélope’s generosity means I can ask anything from her and she’ll deliver,” he says. “But I have to be careful because with that power I can hurt her. Truly, when she works with me, she devotes her whole heart, which is a very delicate thing and I don’t want to hurt her in any way. There is a tacit agreement that that could potentially happen, but it didn’t happen with this movie.… It was a blessed movie. We didn’t have any of the typical problems.”

(Emilio Pereda/El Deseo/Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

Many critics have praised Volver as Almodóvar’s best. (My pick is still Talk To Her.) Certainly, he finds an intensity and depth in Cruz that’s absent in her American work. The pair worked on Cruz’s portrayal of Raimunda over several weeks, coming up with a look and attitude that’s a deliberate evocation of the Italian neo-realism stars Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani (who Cruz cites as her favourite actress, alongside Meryl Streep). Having deemed her cleavage “perfect,” Almodóvar fleshed out Cruz’s backside with a prosthetic — “it was my Tootsie ass,” jokes Cruz, dressed in a pair of skinny jeans that would never fit her character’s ample badonkadonk.

“I’m my own toughest judge,” Cruz says. “I’ve done 35 movies and only four of them I think, ‘I did OK.’ When I saw this film, I felt good about it. I didn’t torture myself about it.… When I saw the movie I was nervous to say [that it was better than his others], because I am Pedro’s biggest fan and nobody can love him more than I do. But my opinion, for me, this is his best movie.… [I even forgot] that it was me playing that character on the screen.”

Almodóvar’s shift away from the outrageous, campy and occasionally crude defiance of his early work began, he says, in 1995 with The Flower of My Secret. “There is a more inner direction, rather than external direction in my work. Less emphasis on humour and more on emotion.” Now in his mid-fifties, Almodóvar says that, “In the last four or five years, for the first time, I was conscious of the passing of time and that I have lived, in the best case, half of my life. And that concerned me quite a lot because unfortunately I’m not a believer. I see nothing beyond this life and that gave me an incredible anxiety and it made me feel weaker, lost, disoriented.” And thus the return, in Volver, to his birthplace. “One of the themes [of the film] is the way people of La Mancha live with death and dead people. They do it in a natural way. They talk to them, they clean the tombs three times a week, they still do that. It’s very natural and I feel envious of them.”

Asked if Viva Pedro, a splashy theatrical re-release of some of his best-known films, makes him feel as though he’s been given the equivalent of a Lifetime Achievement Award — that is, a distinction for those whose best work is behind them — he laughs.

“No, no, no. It’s a privilege to have my earlier works on the market so that young people can see the films that they might not have seen. In this career, there is no end. There is not a moment when you say, ‘Now I know how to make films. Now I am sure I am going to make a good movie.’ The nature of this work isn’t to be insecure. But it does mean never being serene.”

Volver opens in Toronto and Vancouver on Nov. 24.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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