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Tuesday, 06 February 2007 15:21 |
By ANNA LEE
Pedro Almodovarës new film "Volver" is bizarre ¨?ÇƒÓ complete with incest, adultery, murder and family forgiveness.
Some weird, funny foreign films are good. Remember "Amelie?" That was a delightful movie.
Unfortunately, "Volver" is in keeping with Almodovarës previous films "All About My Mother" (1999) and "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" (1988).
While it has an enchantingly strange plot, it is another painful, overly melodramatic family drama with too much dialogue and too many annoying characters.
What
begins as a compelling, surreal and unusual narrative hook, with a
teenage girl (Yohana Cobo) murdering her father and the mother,
Raimunda, (Penelope Cruz) burying the body, morphs into an
anti-climactic series of overly cute comedy scenes centered around the
return of Raimundaës dead mother (Carmen Maura).
The film then
degenerates into a series of family and neighborhood squabbles that
turn out to be rooted in some secret and disturbing events of the past.
Imagine a movie
that combines the deadpan, grotesque, disturbing humor of "Fargo"
(1996) with the syrupy sweet and whiny, self-absorbed character played
by Sandra Bullock in the 1998 film "Hope Floats."
Replace the
Sandra Bullock character with Cruz and add an alluring, fun twist of
the magical realism found in classic Spanish-language literature, such
as the novels of Gabriel Garcia Lorca and the plays of Federico Garcia
Lorca.
At its best, this film evokes that atmosphere of magical realism.
At its worst, it merely expresses a self-absorbed, whiny Cruz in tiny, too-tight outfits showing too much cleavage.
But what is the point of the sex appeal? One cannot imagine men going to see such a chick-flick as this.
Such mysteries
aside, in spite of the disturbing exposition and disappointing
conclusion, one must admire the filmës daring creativity.
The viewer never
knows what will happen next and is always in for a surprise, and
perhaps a light laugh. The film is beautifully done and the acting is
good.
Particularly
standing out is the acting of Maura, who plays Raimundaës dead mother.
Maura is brilliantly in character and manages to convincingly be sweet,
returned from the dead and funny all at once.
Really, those viewers who already know they like films written and directed by Almovodar may love this film.
Viewers should just make sure they know what sort of trouble theyëre going into before they walk into the theater.
ï
Anna Lee is a junior in mass communications at UNC Asheville.
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