- Before I knew better, I thought the title was pronounced in a way similar to “revolver”, like the
gunBeatles album. There are spats in the IMDB forums about whether or not the V’s are pronounced as B’s, depending on your dialect. Everyone I have heard say it pronounces it “Vol-VAIR”. So that’s that. - The fashion in this film was out of this world. Maybe it’s a European thing, mixing that many different garish patterns together, I don’t know, but the textiles were fabulous in their awfulness. Actually, it reminded me of all the tacky crap they have at H&M right now that no one in their right mind would ever wear. I did like how they took the patterns from the textiles and turned them into stylized graphics in the closing credits. None of it looked out of place in the film or on any of the actors, though; it shouldn’t work, but does.
- The moral of this story is: if you have to kill someone, you can repent by taking care of terminally ill neighbours.
- Having now seen Chinatown, all I could think when we found out the identity Penelope Cruz’s daughter’s father was “She’s my sister and my daugther!” Ugh, random incest in stories, how I loathe you. At least the character development and plot in Volver had a lot more riding on that particular revelation than Chinatown did.
- Loved the cheek kissing because the exaggeration made it amusing even for people who might be used to that type of European greeting.
- I’m not quite sure why Raimunda couldn’t have gone to the police when her daughter confessed murdering Paco. It was clearly a case of self-defense and I don’t doubt that Paula wouldn’t have been charged with anything. Why must people in movies always make things so complicated when they kill people? I’ll blame this on Raimunda having flashbacks to her own rape due to the similarity of the situation, causing her not to think straight. Or whatever.
- The point of re-opening the neighbour’s restaurant and feeding the film crew was…? I get that she needed a place to store Paco’s body, but since the neighbour was out of town and had already closed down the restaurant, Raimunda easily could have just left his body in the deep freeze until she had an opportunity to move it, regardless of whether or not she chose to start serving food in the restaurant. That’s got to be a health code violation, at any rate.
- I was pretty convinced that Agustina had cancer right from the start of the film, since they were like “She has incredibly short hair and smokes a lot of pot! OMG CHEMO!” right from her introduction, but she seemed pretty damned shocked when she was diagnosed, so WTF. That’s too weird and major to be a continuity error.
- What’s with white subtitles not having any sort of drop shadow anymore? The ones in Letters from Iwo Jima didn’t either, and half the time the words would get lost on incredibly light parts of the screen.
Volver
If you’re only going to see one Spanish-language film this year, go see Pan’s Labyrinth instead.
IMDB Plot Synopsis After her death, a mother returns to her home town in order to fix the situations she couldn't resolve during her life.