Pragmatic. That’s one way to describe Penélope Cruz’s vulnerable, vibrant, vigorous performance in Pedro Almodóvar’s “Volver.”
Tiring of “v” adjectives? Sorry. Here’s another that captures the actor and her character Raimunda, a Madrid wife and mother who begins a catering business after her husband, ahem, disappears – “voluptuous.”
In his entertaining notes to his touching delight of a film, Almodóvar writes under the header “The Strength and Fragility of Penélope Cruz”:
“Penélope is at the height of her beauty. It’s a cliché but in her case it’s true. (Those eyes, her neck, her shoulders, her breasts!! Penélope’s got one of the most spectacular cleavages in world cinema.)”
Décolleté aside, there is something even more revealing about the 32-year-old actress’ performance.
She cries, she laughs, she stuffs a very heavy object into a dodgy refrigerator. She responds to difficulty. She makes things happen.
Full-bodied and nuanced, funny and tender, the performance makes one feel like you are seeing Cruz for the first time. Which leads to a hypothesis: It must be her comfort acting in her mother tongue that allowed a range we haven’t seen in her English-language films like the adventure romp “Sahara” and “Vanilla Sky,” Cameron Crowe’s version of a Spanish film she also starred in.
But Cruz dispatched this theory with an easy grace one afternoon in Telluride, where “Volver” had its North American premiere.
“It’s because of what this character demanded,” she said. “If they offer you that kind of character you can prove yourself.”
Before one could launch into a lament on the problems of American scripts, she added, “I am very grateful for the opportunity I’m getting in America, but I’ve been working in Spain since I was 16 and America only since eight years ago.”
In “Volver,” Almodóvar puts his heroine through some emotionally operatic paces. Raimunda’s husband turns out to be worse than a lout. Her teen daughter needs her protection and unconditional love. She has to make a living, in a hurry.
Yet she responds to the challenges or circumstance with a physical clarity her own mother (played by Carmen Maura) never did.
When her beloved aunt dies in a village in La Mancha, the past becomes even more entangled with the future.
“She’s the kind of character you would throw everything else away for for six months, the kind of character you live for, ” said Cruz. “There are not many characters like that.”
At the Cannes film festival Cruz and her “Volver” co-stars Maura, Lola Duena, Yohana Cobo, Chuz Lampreave and Blanca Portillo shared best actor honors. Cruz was just nominated for a best-actress Golden Globe. Come January, the Academy will likely do the same.
“It’s difficult to talk about acting without sounding crazy,” she said. “You have to have something, you have to be obsessed by human behavior, human feeling. You have to find the sanity in the chaos.”
On “Volver,” Cruz said she had to go to “a place of emotional heartbreak. Maybe you’re crying for eight hours straight.”
If she did, Almodóvar was right there. Cruz put her hand little more than a foot from her face to give a sense of how intimately the director works with his performers.
“He knows it’s emotionally hard,” Cruz said.
And she knows it’s worth it. “Volver” proves how right they are.
