Volver

Ghosts and secrets

I re-watch Volver (Return) and think about the relationship between ghosts and secrets. I find myself thinking that it's the ghosts that awaken the secrets, and that it is the secrets that bring them to life.

The other times I've watched the film, I thought that Carmen Maura's character hadn't actually died. This time, however, Carmen Maura seemed to me to have returned from the world of the dead, a proper ghost. And the film seemed less comical and more serious: what had that mother come back to life for? What is a ghost, and above all, how is one shown? Exactly as a person is shown, or in another, more enigmatic way?

So Volver seems to me like an attempt to answer this important question. How to awaken and show a ghost? What do we humans have to do to our lives to awaken them?

Do they come, like Carmen Maura, for us to help them, or do they awaken to help us, do they awaken when they see us in distress? Volver leaves the answer open, bringing a mother's ghost to life when her daughter finds herself in distress, because the moment Raimunda feels in trouble coincides with the moment Raimunda's mother feels in trouble: some spirits cannot bear the distress of those they loved.

Volver feeds on the coincidence between the needs of both, mother and daughter, daughter and ghost. The coincidence between one needing to see the other again and ask for forgiveness, and the other needing to find the mother's comfort, which was sought and denied a whole lifetime. The film feeds on the coincidence between the needs of the living and the dead, the moment these needs meet. This is how ghosts awaken, in those moments, Volver reveals to us, when what the living need is what the dead have to give them and vice versa.

A film of mothers and daughters, of what mothers are willing to do for their daughters and the agony they feel when they are absent, Volver also reveals that all mothers aspire to the condition of ghosts: since, beginning before we properly begin, mothers do not end. It is this perennial mother, from the world of the dead, that Carmen Maura plays. Did she come back to ask for forgiveness or to be forgiven? A ghost who looks just like a person, with the needs of people (she needs her hair dyed and cut, for example, which supports the coincidence between desires and possibilities that I referred to). So flesh and blood that they are almost spirits, the women of Volver cross country and city, are from near and far, from the wind and the silence. All of them hide something; they are bodies of secrets. They hide things to protect one another and to protect themselves from men.

Here, "mother" is another name for blindness, for all that we are capable of not seeing for a long time, and for what we are capable of doing for love. It is also a name for who one becomes after the scales fall from our eyes and we see what we hadn't seen.

Then the parody, the knives, the plunging necklines and red peppers, the blood, the hairstyles, and the evocations of Italian cinema seem to me less decisive in Volver than the subtle dialogue between the dead and the living. This subtle dialogue is what allows us to admit that Carmen Maura awoke from the world of the dead to help Raimunda, because Raimunda was the one who could give her rest.