Almodóvar’s Female Odyssey

Corinne O. Pache (Yale University)

In this paper I examine the connections between Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (2006) and Homer’s Odyssey. A meditation on the idea of return (Spanish volver), the movie does not refer directly to the Odyssey, yet Odyssean motifs are ubiquitous in the film. Like all narratives of return, Volver must reckon with Homer's precedent: as the paradigmatic narrative of familial reunion, all western narratives of return must pass through the Homeric prototype. The film indeed goes back to a Greek understanding of nostos as coming back to life (a connotation that the Spanish volver en si, “to come to, to regain consciousness,” also shares) and offers many variations of the theme: return of the past, return of the dead, the cyclical nature of life, and the link between homecoming and self-knowledge. I argue that Homer’s poem exerts a powerful and abiding intertextual influence upon the narrative, which centers on the same themes of memory, story-telling, and home we find in the ancient epic. Focusing on the modern experience of the family and the connections between husbands and wives, parents and children, memory and identity Volver reimagines the Greek theme of nostos. The parallels with its ancient counterpart also highlight the revolutionary nature of the film: Volver offers a resolutely original and feminist perspective on the idea of homecoming.

After giving a brief summary of the plot, I focus on the feminization of the nostos narrative through the lens of a defining moment: the powerful performance by the central character of the film, Raimunda, of the song, also titled “Volver,” which she sings mid-way through the movie. Longing and grief overtake her as she sings about remembering the past, and simultaneously starts coming to term with the abuse she endured from her father and her anger at the passivity of her mother, Irene, who, unbeknownst to her, has returned and watches her singing. Irene, like Odysseus listening to Demodokos singing about his role in the Trojan War in Odyssey 8, completely breaks down when she hears her daughter singing. A 1934 tango composed by Carlos Gardel with lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera, “Volver” is a perfect locus of nostos and nostalgia: from the glory days of tango, the lyrics express the bittersweetness of years gone by and the grief of return. As Raimunda sings that “20 years is nothing” (“que veinte años no es nada”), we see her coming fully into herself as daughter, sister, and mother. The twenty years in question are of course everything: the duration of Irene’s absence, the lifespan of Raimunda’s daughter (who has never heard her mother sing before) and her own role as mother. Through the power of song, Irene and Raimunda achieve homecoming.

By analyzing the film in terms of its Homeric precursor, I show the radical novelty of Almodóvar’s feminization of the nostos narrative. Like Odysseus who tells his own story to the Phaiacians in the Odyssey, Raimunda is a character who sings her own song, and, in both narratives, songs also have the power to recreate the past. Yet in contrast with the Homeric world, in Almodóvar’s female Odyssey, men play no active role; rather, they are obstacles which must yield in the face of the female-defined trajectory of the narrative. This shift to the feminine realm is beautifully encapsulated in the way in which Raimunda appropriates the song “Volver” and transforms an Argentinian tango traditionally sung by a man into a Spanish flamenco song. Instead of the father/husband hero, it is the mother figure who returns—as if from the dead in the case of Raimunda’s mother—and achieves homecoming, and the fundamental reunion is not between a father and his wife and son, but between mothers and daughters. The movie ends where it started, in the small village in La Mancha where the living encounter the dead, and where women—mothers, sisters, daughters—safeguard each other’s nostos.