The Daily Life of Sweetpea[s]

I saw Volver on Tuesday night and I really enjoyed it. Penélope Cruz is amazing and the story is funny and sad and light and heavy and thought-provoking all at the same time. It's in Spanish and that makes me happy, too. It gets four out of five wedding bouquets.

It's hard to explain the plot in a way that seems interesting and without ruining the movie, but here is the synopsis from the website:

Three generations of women survive the east wind, fire, insanity, superstition and even death by means of goodness, lies and boundless vitality.

They are Raimunda (Pénelope Cruz), who is married to an unemployed labourer and has a teenage daughter (Yohana Cobo); Sole (Lola Dueñas), her sister, who makes a living as a hairdresser; and the mother of both (Carmen Maura), who died in a fire along with her husband. This character appears first to her sister (Chus Lampreave) and then to Sole, although the people with whom she has some unresolved matters are Raimunda and her neighbour in the village, Agustina (Blanca Portillo).

Volver is not a surrealistic comedy although it may seem so at times. The living and the dead coexist without any discord, causing situations that are either hilarious or filled with a deep, genuine emotion. It's a film about the culture of death in La Mancha. The people there practice it with an admirable naturalness. The way in which the dead continue to be present in their lives, the richness and humanity of their rites mean that the dead never die.