Volver

Volver is a film that shows us the lives of a group of women and how their lives are intertwined. There are a few men in the film but only in small roles with the exception of two of them. Their roles are small but extremely important to the telling of the story. The first is Raimunda’s father, we never even meet him except to see his head stone at the beginning, and the other is Paco, Raimunda’s dead beat husband. It is because of these two men that the women are all drawn together in the same circle. It takes almost the entire film to truly find out about the tribulations that these women have faced and overcome.
When we meet Paco for the first time we are shown the scum that he really is. He literally looks up his daughter’s skirt, more than once, when she sits down in the chair. We do not know it at the time but we soon find out, after Paula stabs him to death because he tried to sexually molest her, that he is really not her father. Next we find out that Raimunda and Sole’s father cheated on their mother all the time. Besides cheating on his wife, we also find out that he was also a child molester. He sexually molested Raimunda and got her pregnant. Raimunda and Sole’s father met his demise at the hands of his wife, Irene. She found him in bed with Agustina’s mother and set the hut on fire, killing them both. Everyone thought it was Irene in the hut with him so instead of turning herself in she went into hiding, ending up taking care of her ailing sister. Once all of these stories come out we see how these women showed their resilience by overcoming some of life’s most hideous tribulations to become strong, beautiful, courageous women. You would have to be strong to be reminded daily that your daughter was born from being sexually molested by your own father. It also shows Raimunda’s strength to give her daughter unconditional love. She proved that love by taking care of the situation surrounding the death of Paco. The only problem I have with the film is that we applaud these women for who they are and for what they had the strength to do but in actuality they committed crimes themselves.
To me the superstitions portrayed in this film can easily be explained. The East winds were thought to make people crazy. Aunt Paula was a victim of these winds or was she? Everyone thought she was crazy because she spoke of Irene in the present when she was supposed to have been dead for the past three years. We find out that she was not crazy, Irene was alive and living with her cooking and caring for her. Agustina believed in ghost which came out when she was telling all the women how it was the ghost of Irene that let her know that Paula had died. She believed in ghost so much that she wanted Raimunda to try and contact her dead mother and ask her if she knew what happened to her mother that just up and disappeared three years prior. We know now that Irene was not a ghost and she ended up caring for Agustina who was dying from cancer. Maybe this was to be her penitence for killing Agustina’s mother along with her cheating husband.