Returning

"Volver" is dominated by women's themes. The friend who recommended it to me was anxious that I wouldn't like it. As it turned out, I ended up telling him, "heck, I most probably got the movie more than you did."

Female relationships--mother-to-daughter, sister-to-sister, girlfriend-to-girlfriend--are key elements to how the film comes full circle, the glue being one woman's supposed death and believed return and regular appearances as a ghost. Depicting how a mother's love can transcend life and death, the movie is at times absurd, comic and often painfully real. The human tenacity to cling to faith and life, despite and in spite of the many obstacles death and its harbingers bring, is spun neatly into the tale.

I cannot allow myself to miss mentioning, too, that the predominance of superstition and myth in Hispanic culture is essential to the telling of the story, if not to the conception itself of the story.

Daughters (and sons, too) and mothers had better watch this film. Though often taken for granted and most of the time overlooked, we all need to return to that most precious--and binding--of ties.


*for an ever so much better and more erudite review, go to film guru Roger Ebert. =)