Where will the ghost of Irene go now? Why, obviously, to the one who needs her most - Raimunda.
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Paco ends up on the kitchen floor, his arms and legs splayed in an uncanny reminder of the body on the poster of Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder." Two deaths occur closely spaced to upset this happy balance: Aunt Paula keels over, and young Paula repulses an advance by her stepfather Paco using a large, bloody, very Hitchcockian knife. We meet Raimunda ( Penelope Cruz) and Sole ( Lola Duenas), Irene's daughters Raimunda's daughter, Paula ( Yohana Cobo), and Paco (Antonio de la Torre), Raimunda's beer-swilling, layabout husband. In exemplary classic style, Almodovar uses a right-to-left tracking shot to show this housekeeping carrying us back into the past, and then a subtle, centered zoom to establish the past as part of the present. They live, or whatever you'd call it, in a Spanish town where the men die young, and the women spend weekends cheerfully polishing and tending their graves, just as if they were keeping house for them. In Pedro Almodovar's enchanting, gentle, transgressive "Volver," a deceased matriarch named Irene ( Carmen Maura) has moved in with her sister Paula (Chus Lampleave), who is growing senile and appreciates some help around the house, especially with the baking.
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My Aunt Martha would more likely be cutting the cards for a game of canasta. And how boring to smile and beckon benevolently all the time. You'd run out of customers in a generation or two. How would you like to spend the afterlife? Hanging around in a tunnel of pure light, welcoming new arrivals from among your family and friends? It seems to me a dreary prospect.