The story starts with a sexual assault, a brutal act of violence and the cover-up which follows it, but we are less concerned here with crime and punishment than the relationships between mothers and daughters, sisters and friends. From the opening credits, as the camera pans across a small-town cemetery where widows and daughters kneel, polishing the tombs of their dearly departed, there is no moment or plot strand that would work with a male protagonist. While Hollywood casts its leading ladies in roles that could as easily go to men - spies, action heroines, scientists - or in soppy chick flicks, Almodóvar’s women are faced with peculiarly female dilemmas. After the dark and largely male Bad Education, however, Almodóvar has returned to his usual preoccupation with the fairer sex, and he’s rarely been on better form. It might seem odd that a country as steeped in machismo as Spain has produced Volver (pronounced “boll-bear”), for there has rarely been a film so very female.
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