Cannes Film Festival: Volver by Pedro Almodovar and Hamaca Paraguaya by Paz Encina (Transcript) Originally broadcast May 22, 2006
Milos Stehlik
Listen to Milos Stehlik's Commentary
Volver is the new film by Almodovar, one of the highly anticipated premieres here in the Festival in Cannes. The film stars Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura and Lola Duenas. Cruz and Duenas are two daughters from a small village in the windy northeast of Spain, now both living in Madrid. Cruz is married to Paco and has a teenage daughter. As the film starts, he loses his job. She works cleaning at some faceless institution. Maura operates an illegal beauty parlor from her home. Volver, which means something like “coming back”, is a film about returning, and death is at its central core. Cruz and Duenas’ mother, played by Carmen Maura, died four years ago, together with her husband, in a fire. The film starts with another death, that of Cruz and Duenas’ aunt, Paula. And Paula’s neighbor, Agustina, whose own personal history is intertwined with that of her neighbor, finds out she has terminal cancer.
But Volver is less a film about death than about acceptance. When Carmen Maura comes back—returns from the dead, so to speak—Volver extends that acceptance to the realization of one’s past, reconciliation and forgiveness.
This is a different Almodovar than we are used to. It is a further evolution from his Bad Education, Talk To Her and Life Flesh. The mature Almodovar is turning to films that are more serious, thoughtful, moral.
There is humor and irony in Volver, but the pace is much slower, the jokes are clever but far in between, and don’t really skewer anyone. It is a quieter, more peaceful Almodovar. Infidelity is at the root of the elaborate family mess that motivates the plot of Volver, but Almodovar doesn’t approach it moralistically or in any preachy way. Instead, he seems more interested in the idea of reconciliation—how human relationships can be “fixed,” completed, how people can forgive each other for the injustices committed in their past.
It is perhaps a less commercial film than other Almodovar films, and one less easy to capsulize and get a handle on, because Almodovar is not out to shock or outrage, rather to engage and make the audience think.
Among the more demanding films shown here in Cannes is the Paraguayan feature, Hamaca Paraguaya. Paraguayan film industry is virtually non—existent, and so completing the film was already an achievement. It is the first of six features commissioned by director/impresario Peter Sellars, as a part of his Vienna-based project celebrating the Mozart 250th anniversary. The film is set in June, 1935, a date important in Paraguayan history. It consists of a series of a few static, very long shots. There are two characters, a husband and a wife, who appear in a jungle clearing, set up a hammock and sit on it. Their small talk, full of bickering, is about the heat, about a dog that barks off and on in the background. Eventually the subject shifts to talk of their son, Ramon, who left to fight in a war. This war, we learn from the press book, though not from the film, was the Chaco war over disputed land in the territory of Chaco, between peasants who had been made landless by big foreign farming companies. The film is not in Spanish, but in the indigenous language of Guarani, which most of the inhabitants of Paraguay spoke before the arrival of the Spanish.
Hamaca Paraguaya is a very demanding film because it is very static. Nothing happens. Eventually, it turns dark and the couple give up their hammock to go back to their house—which we never see—and go to sleep. But in its minimalist aesthetic, which shifts it to the extreme fringes of experimental features, it is in its way rigorous and eloquent. The long shots and long silences speaking more deeply about the tragedy of the indigenous people than if it had been a historical melodrama.
This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.
Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.
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