While a true cinephile will relish studying the nuances and reoccurring themes and images of the great director, Pedro Almódovar, you don't need to have a film degree to appreciate the luminous joy of Volver.
Much has been made of the movie's opening scene, with great reason; the camera moves in on a cemetery where ladies in colorful dresses clean the graves of their families, or, in one character's case, what will soon be her own. Raimunda (Penelope Cruz), her sister Soledad (Lola Duenas), and Raimunda's daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) clean their dead mother's grave, while nearby Agustina (Blanca Portillo) readies her own. Meanwhile, their senile, nearly blind Aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave) is living alone in their mother's old house, and rumors float around their village of La Mancha that the ghost of her sister Irene (Carmen Maura) is taking care of her.
Normal life in the city is thrown into chaos when Raimunda's husband "disappears," Aunt Paula dies, and the wild-haired ghost of Irene follows Soledad back to the city to comfort her daughters and granddaughter and finally, come clean about the past of their family. In the face of personal disaster, Raimunda uses a chance opportunity to cook for a film crew at the empty restaurant next door, and Soledad uses her mother's ghost as a hair washer in her illegal home hairdressing business.
Volver's universe is comprised almost entirely of women; the men make brief appearances, usually accompanied by betrayal and violence, with the exception of a flirty fellow from the film crew. This female world is wound tight with secrets as well as with death, loneliness, and volatility, especially Cruz's Raimunda, whose eyes seem to be brimming with tears in almost every scene. There's a lot of comedy in Volver as well; when Raimunda enlists her prostitute friend to help her both with a midnight project, the woman misunderstands her request and asks her, to put it in polite terms, that she didn't know Raimunda liked women.
In one restaurant scene, Paula and others urge Raimunda to sing for the crew, her secret talent and once her dream; she joins guitar players in the backyard and sings the titular song, Volver, meaning "to return." Outside, Irene listens with tears in her eyes.
Each scene is lovingly crafted, with bright colors and the beautiful scenery of La Mancha, the mellifluous cadences of Castilian Spanish, and of course the faces, young and old, of each actress. The complexity of the main characters, most especially Raimunda and young Paula, and Almodóvar's uncanny ability to puncture the chaos of families, both of blood and of our choosing, make Volver a must-see.
