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發表於 2006-11-2 10:42:10
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IN YOUR FACE
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Listen to the kissing. That is my advice to anyone watching the start of “Volver,” the new film from Pedro Almodóvar. The director has outgrown his early, or “horny as a bullfighter,” period, so the kisses are no longer driven by lust. Instead, we have a gaggle of women, young and old, exchanging pecks on the cheek—the mildest of greetings, except that they sound like rifle shots. Close your eyes and you could be watching “The Wild Bunch.”
This small excess proves that Almodóvar is still crazy after all these years. His movies may have calmed down, or grown up, and they are fashioned with more structural nicety than those of any other current director, yet much about them remains not just larger but louder than life. Like Martin Scorsese (or, before him, Michael Powell), Almodóvar has a raging sweet tooth for the color red, which time will never allay. “Volver” is emblazoned with a scarlet reel of fire hose, a mopful of human gore, the slicing of red peppers, and a station wagon that appears to have been spray-painted with tomato soup. When the main character, Raimunda (Penélope Cruz), answers the door to a guy who runs the restaurant next door, he points out a smear of blood on her neck. “Women’s troubles,” she says. She could be describing the whole film.
The particular trouble besetting Raimunda, and the source of that blood, is the body of her late husband. His name was Paco (Antonio de la Torre), and he was murdered, earlier that night, by their teen-age daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo), at whose crotch he had been gazing, and on whom he eventually pounced. Instantly, almost proudly, his widow assumes responsibility: “Remember, I killed him,” she says to Paula. Whatever else, she will not let her daughter be punished for this high but excusable crime. I liked the moral fierceness here—the snap of Cruz’s voice and the glare of her eyes, lined as heavily as Tutankhamen’s. Raimunda stashes the corpse in the restaurant’s freezer—the owner has gone away—and without any training or experience she takes over the business, casually serving lunchtime feasts for thirty. This being Madrid, the food is largely pig-centric, although we are left to wonder whether she ran short of sausage one day, looked at the freezer, and made do with Paco a la plancha.
Raimunda and her sister, Sole (Lola Dueñas), who is as lonely as her name suggests, lost their mother, Irene (Carmen Maura), in a fire some years ago. Now Irene comes back. There were already hints that she was caring for their aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave), who was old and forgetful; now, on the aunt’s demise, Irene becomes a free agent once more. Being technically dead should, by rights, obstruct her ability to get the most out of life, but Almodóvar would treat such objections as pedantic. He is a post-Christian director, and “Volver” displays a healthy, no-nonsense approach to the resurrection of the body. Initially, Irene opts for the full-on spectre look, complete with snaky white locks, but soon she sharpens up, gets a trim, and resumes her old, voluble, and flatulent self. The primary task of a Hollywood ghost is to spook, whereas Irene has returned on a more diplomatic errand—to explain, to plead, and, as she tells Raimunda, “to ask you to forgive me.” There are ancient sins, it turns out, jammed in the cracks of the past, which require expiation. As usual, they are the sins of the fathers.
“Volver” is as manless a movie as I have seen. There was a time in Almodóvar’s career—round about “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!”—when the young hunk who visits Raimunda’s restaurant would have settled the check with a handsome tip, preferably over a hot stove, but this time he goes away unslaked. Raimunda prefers the friendship of a local whore, Regina (María Isabel Díaz), who says that “with your cleavage and my mojitos, we’d make a fortune.” Not until late in the story did I realize that Regina was a whore, since there is not a client in sight. At one point, Sole meets a gang of silent menfolk outside a house, but they are never glimpsed again. Compare the overhead shots of women, which might have been filmed by a guardian angel: Raimunda’s hair and bosom as she scrubs the murder weapon in the sink; or a swarm of women in black, clustered around the mourning Sole, fluttering their fans, against a tessellated floor. Sympathy, style, and order: one sex holds all the dice.
The question is not whether such imbalance is fair—the movies are crammed from week to week with misogyny, which demands a storming response—but to what extent “Volver” is attuned to the real. So much of it wants to feel rough and grounded, like the two women hacking at hard soil with a pickaxe, as they prepare to entomb a man. Yet the film, against my wishes, left me unmoved. There is a lovely scene in which Cruz sings (or lip-synchs) a plaintive ballad, with her tears brimming and the words laying forth the theme of return, but that is just the problem: you feel another cog being added to the film’s emotional engine, and something about the construction seems too efficient and pat. The fact that the heroines’ feelings are presented as open and raw does not make “Volver” any less of a concoction—a half-camp, half-noble dream of female solidarity, any grains of bitchiness tossed aside like salt. The climactic revelations, concerning which parent did what to which child, are both startling and unsurprising, and you sense that an alternative set of horrors would have made no difference. Almodóvar’s point is that the same injustices crop up from one generation to the next (note that the senile aunt and the molested youngster bear the same name, Paula); all that women can do is band together, like Spartans, and fend off the threat. I tried to imagine a policeman entering the stronghold of this movie and seeking to impose the law of the land. He would be set upon, like Actaeon, and torn apart.
by ANTHONY LANE
Issue of 2006-11-06
Posted 2006-10-30
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/ |
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