"There are always things that are left undone. Or done badly. And my life has been no exception. Look, I don't know if I can fix them, but if I can, it's up to me to do it."
Wow, I just realised that I've never written a review about a movie not in the English or Danish language. It's not like I've never wanted to; I've had a draft of a review of the Korean movie Internal Affairs lying on my hard drive for months, I've just never gotten around to finishing it. It's well past time that I do something about this foreign-movie-drought though, and the film I've chosen to help me do this is Pedro Almodóvar's Volver. I've heard a lot of good things about Almodóvar and his Spanish movies over the past few weeks, and since Volver is supposed to be one of his best, I decided to give it a go last night.
Volver takes place in a small town somewhere in Spain, and it stars Penélope Cruz, Lola Duenas and Blanca Portillo in the lead roles. The place where these women live is a somewhat old fashioned and traditional place where dead people are rumoured to return as ghost if they have unfinished business, and thos plot device is the main turning point of the movie. Raimunda (Cruz) doesn't believe in that sort of nonsense though, and she spends most of her time working and worrying about taking care of her teenage daughter and her lazy husband. Raimunda is very close to her sister Sole (Portillo) and a friend of theirs called Agustina (Duenas), and the three of them often tend to Raimunda and Sole's Aunt together, who just happens to be Agustina's next door neighbour.
On one faithful day, this old aunt passes away, and Raimunda and her daughter have a very unpleasant experience in their apartment simultaneously. The film centers around these two events and how the small group of women deal with them, and over time, the plot develops into a mosaic of regret, love, secrecy, faith and death. This might sound great and all, but right off the bat, I have to admit that I didn't enjoy this movie whatsoever. I do realise that I'm probably not the target audience for this sort of movie, but still, there a lot of very simple things about it that didn't make sense at all; things that I don't know how any of the countless amount of critiques that have praised it to the sky can have missed.
My main problem with the Volver is how unfunny it is, even though it's supposed to be a comedy. I realise that a lot of the funny moments might have been lost in translation, seeing as I don't speak Spanish and had to watch it with English subtitles, but still, there genuinely isn't anything funny about this movie whatsoever. In my opinion, the few attempts it made at being funny fell to the floor very quickly, because of the dull way in which the jokes and jibes were being delivered. Apart from Cruz and Portillo, none of the actors seemed to care about what they were doing whatsoever, and looking at the completely stoned out facial expression that Lola Duenas sports for the entire two hour duration of the movie got especially frustration very quickly.
Another one of my main concerns about this film, is how blatantly and abruptly it dropped entire story arcs half way through the story. Also, some of the things that take place in this movie are things that would scar and haunt people for life, but in this case, they just don't. Common sense is completely thrown overboard several times throughout the cause of the plot, and there are several examples of subplots that might mean something or might begin to go places, that are then completely dropped and ignored for the rest of the movie. Every time the main characters experience something or get into a peculiar situation for an example, they deal with it for 20-30 minutes, and then that event doesn't matter for the rest of the film, even though it would have affected a real life human being tremendously. I'm sorry, but I just can't go with that.
The main plot device of this movie is the one about dead people coming back to fix things they didn't complete whilst they were alive. This might sound like an intriguing and interesting idea, but the way it's handled in this film makes it seem utterly stupid and unbelievable. One of the reasons for this is the fact that when dead people suddenly appear in front of one of the main characters, they don't react to it in a way that any normal person would do, if they were to meet someone they thought was long gone. A lot of the decisions that these dead people make are weird and don't make sense either, and they seem to make up strange rules for themselves that they absolutely have to follow in one scene, but then in the next scene seem to have forgotten completely. I spend way more time asking myself questions such as "if they're able to do that, then why can't they do this?" than I spent being fascinated by what was taking place on the screen, which is one of the deadliest sins a movie can commit in my opinion.
Watching this movie was a very frustrating, unsatisfying and boring experience that I hope I'll never have to go trough again. I have no idea why so many critiques have praised it as much as they have, and especially those reviews that claim that it's a funny and well written movie leave me scratching my head with a weird expression on face. There are way to many loose ends and sloppy story lines that didn't need to be there in this film for me to enjoy it whatsoever, and even though Penélope Cruz isn't exactly hard to look at, I think her performance as Raimunda is vastly overrated. Not only her character, but all the other characters were just flat out stupid, ignorant and weird as well, which made for a very bad and eyebrow raising movie experience. There's no redeeming qualities in this movie whatsoever, and thus, Pedro Almodóvar's Volver is a true eye gouger, at least in my opinion. (1/6)
Volver IMDb link here
Volver trailer here
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