Volver at the Sidewalk

Sidewalk Cafe screens Volver on Tuesday at 7 pm.

According to a press release, a Pedro Almodóvar film, Volver (To Return) occurs in Spain in 2006. In the film, Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) is a janitor at the Madrid airport who lives with her adolescent daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) and her drunken, lay-about husband Paco (Antonio de la Torre).

Raimunda and her hairdresser sister, Sole (Lola Dueñas), return to their La Mancha village to visit their senile auntie (Chus Lampreave, who’s played marvellous old biddies in several Almodóvar films).

There, they learn that locals have spotted the ghost of their dead mother haunting the family home. But is this just village superstition, or does their mother, Irene (Carmen Maura), have something she still needs to accomplish on earth?

Almodóvar says of the story that “it is precisely about death… More than about death itself, the screenplay talks about the rich culture that surrounds death in the region of La Mancha, where I was born. It is about the way (not tragic at all) in which various female characters, of different generations, deal with this culture.” The plot of Volver follows the plot of a movie-within-the-movie based on the main character’s novel in Almodóvar’s 1995 film La flor de mi secreto.

The film was donated by Dr Christopher Carrico. Admission is free.