VOLVER: FILM ANALYSIS

I can almost see the flicker

Of the lights that in the distance

Mark the way of my returning…

They’re the very ones that lit up,

Their reflections pale and misted,

Many hours of deep pain.

Though it was not what I wanted,

First love makes one always come back again.

The quiet [age-old] street where once the echo told me:

Her life is yours, her love is yours to earn,

Under the stars that mockingly look on me,

And now in their indifference see me return.

Return… with my forehead all wrinkled,

My temples turned silver by time’s falling snow…

To feel… that one’s life is a twinkle,

Twenty years hardly reckon,

And two fevered eyes beckon,

In shadows forestall you

And seek you and call you.

To live… with the soul firmly clinging

To one sweet remembrance

That makes me weep so.

I am frightened of the meeting

With the past, that is returning

To confront my life all over.

I am frightened of the nighttimes

When my dreams are linked and fleeting

And old memories come to stay.

And yet the traveller who’s fleeing

Sooner or later must stop on the way…

And though oblivion, which destroys all being,

Has killed my old hopes, ripping them apart,

Yet I keep hidden a humble, hopeful glimmer

That is the only fortune there is in my heart.

Can a song tell the tale of an entire story? No, but It can give you the same feeling story gives. Maybe songs are mere tools to remind ourselves the feelings of old life experiences of others and sometimes ours.

Well, this film takes after the name of Estrella Morente’s song Volver and takes us into the lives of 6 ordinary women and shows us how many oddities “ordinary” can harbour. It is a film about the absurdity of the everyday world. Volver means to return. Characters face the agonies they have long confounded. They change in the process, accept it and then return to the places where they belong. A happy person is a person who is in the place he/she needs to be. But sometimes life exiles us from the places where we belong and compels us to stay in places where we don’t belong Sartre calls this being far from where we belong as anguisse (anguish). Sometimes a bad memory or a wrong decision or a vile person leads us to anguish and we just walk out. Volver is the story of different characters plucking up their courage to return.

The film starts with village ladies clearing up the bushes in a graveyard. It seems that the strong ladies in our film not only takes care of their beloved during a lifetime, but they also continue this habit afterlife as well. Ladies in this film are always tall in their saddles and in full solidarity among themselves. This full solidarity among women is certainly not the case in our modern society. And as for me currently, ladies not being on the same page on lots of different issues is a significant obstacle in women rights movement. In Almodovar’s masterpiece women watch out for each other, unlike reality. In a scene, a woman says we need to wash our dirty laundries among ourselves. These women stand as one flesh against patriarchal society. In Volver, males are only employed in minor roles but still, males are invisible but yet destructive.

Male figures in the film are the reasons women suffer from anguish. We see their actions filled with selfishness, lust and entitlement, causing dire problems to the lives of women around them. Yet women never collapse how hard as it gets because they help each other. They are there for each other when they are in need. That astonishing message is conveyed throughout the film. Almodóvar has something of Sirk’s passionate empathy with women, mixed with a gay sensibility — though the film is unlike Sirk’s in that men are entirely marginal as stated before. In film its vividness and intense, almost neurotic sensitivity to colour, particularly the colour red, it also looks like a Hitchcock thriller. It really is a cinematographic masterpiece. The shooting angles the décor the ambience is astonishing.

As a male myself, this film made me realize the objectification of women and made me aware of the male gaze in the film sector. This film like the portrait of a lady of fire, doesn’t portray females as just mere objects of sexual desire but gets us into their inner world. The film is a combat between male destructiveness and female constructiveness. What is also great is that the context of beauty in this film is richly sensual without being sexual, that makes the gestures of tragicomedy and passion so affecting. When Raimunda says to her miraculously returned mother: “I don’t know how I have lived all these years without you …” it is absurd and comic, but also intensely poignant.

I wasn’t the same person after ending the film. I recommend this masterpiece to everyone.

Kerem Sayar