VOLVER

Year: 2006
USA: Sony Pictures Classics
UK: Pathe Distribution
Cast: Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Duenas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo, Chus Lampreave, Antonio de la Torre, Carlos Blanco, Maria Isabel Diaz, Neus Sanz, Leandro Rivera, Pepa Aniorte, Yolanda Ramos, Elvira Cuadrupani, Alfonsa Rosso, Fanny de Castro, Eli Iranzo, Carlos Garcia Cambero, Magdalena Broto, Isabel Ayucar, Concha Galan, Marie Franç Torres, Natalia Roig
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Country: Spain
Language: Spanish (English subtitles)
USA & UK: 121 mins
USA Rated: Rated R some sexual content and language
UK Certificate: 15 contains moderate sex references and violence
USA Release Date: 3 November 2006 (Limited Release - New York and Los Angeles)
UK Release Date: 25 August 2006

Synopsis

Madrid. Today. Raimunda is a young mother, hard working and very attractive, with an unemployed husband and a daughter in mid-adolescence. The family finances are very shaky, so Raimunda has got several jobs. She is a very strong woman, a born fighter, but also very fragile emotionally. She has kept a terrible secret to herself since childhood.

Her sister Sole is a little older. Timid and fearful, she makes her living running an illegal hair salon. Her husband left her and went off with a client. Since then she has lived on her own.

Paula is their aunt. She lives in a village in La Mancha where the whole family was born. A village swept by the east wind, the direct cause of the high rate of insanity registered there. That damn wind is responsible for the many fires that devastate the area every summer. The parents of Sole and Raimunda died in one of those fires.

A Sunday in spring, Sole calls Raimunda to tell her that Agustina (a neighbour in the village) has phoned to tell her that their Aunt Paula has died. Raimunda adored her aunt, but she can't go to the funeral because moments before getting the call from her sister, she returned from one of her jobs to find her husband dead in the kitchen, with a knife stuck in his chest. Her daughter confesses that she killed him because he had got drunk and kept making sexual advances towards her.

Raimunda's priority is to save her daughter. She still doesn't know how, but she certainly can't accompany Sole to their aunt's funeral in La Mancha who reluctantly goes back to the village on her own. During the wake she hears rumours that her mother (who died in a fire with her father) came back from the other world to look after Aunt Paula in her final years, when she was ill. The neighbours talk quite naturally about the mother's "ghost".

When Sole returns to Madrid, after parking her car, she hears noises coming from the trunk. A voice calls to her to open it and let her out, and says that she's her mother. Sole opens it and discovers the ghost of her mother in there.

Sole doesn't dare tell her sister and lives with her mother's ghost For her part, Raimunda only tells Sole that Paco, her husband, has left her and that she has a feeling he won't be back. Her pressing problem... is what to do with the body!

The untenable becomes routine. Each of the two sisters takes a leap in the dark, surviving situations that are very tense, melodramatic, comic and also very emotional. Both women resolve them with audacity and by telling endless lies.

VOLVER is a story of survival. All the characters are fighting to survive, even the grandmother's ghost.