The Tracks of My Tears (Page 2)

I give away this joke--and only this one, I promise--because it so neatly demonstrates the superiority of Volver's women to its men. For a long while, in fact, you might imagine there aren't any men, but only one man here, another there. Taken singly, they're pretty bad, or weakly good. Viewed in a cluster--as they're seen, I think, only once--they can literally make a character gasp.

The women, by contrast, are almost always shown in a group: organizing meals, doing one another's hair, exchanging stories, giving or receiving aid. Much of the buoyancy and humor of Volver comes from this female conviviality--as when, for example, Cruz abruptly goes into the restaurant business and elicits impromptu help from half her neighborhood. Even the ghostly mother wants to be sociable--which is why she gets rid of her veil of loose white hair, so she will no longer look like one of Mizoguchi's spirits dressed in a cheap housecoat. Some of Volver's biggest laughs come from Maura's down-to-earth manner, as she overcomes the indignities involved in rejoining human company. (When put in a tight spot, she can't just vanish, as a normal ghost would. She needs to duck under the bed, with the smile of a kid playing hide-and-seek.) At the end, though, when she once more returns to her solitude--or almost goes back to it--the sweetness of Maura's resignation gives the film its deepest pathos.

For that final return, Maura steps back into a region of timelessness--someplace that's separate from her daughter's world of bustle and worry ("I'm busy," Cruz continually complains) but is different as well from the conventional image of eternity. The film starts in a small-town cemetery, where women are busy cleaning the tombs. It concludes within the shadows of an old provincial house, where Maura will tend not a slab of marble but another woman's body and spirit. Sociability and hope win out in Volver over solitude and despair--tentatively, just a little--if only because "ghosts aren't supposed to cry."

The living may weep, though--which brings me back to that core scene in which Cruz performs the title song. I think "perform" is the right word, even though you hear someone else's voice, because Cruz makes her whole face sing: "Though time's passing, which wipes away the whole world/ By now has killed off my oldest, dearest dreams/Still I hold within me, hidden like a treasure/Just the simple hope to come back home."

Why is she crying out these lines, and crying over them? On the public level, she is thanking the patrons of her restaurant, and maybe showing off a little for them. More privately, she sings because her mother, who's been lost, taught her "Volver" many years ago, and now she wants to give this song to her own daughter, who came close to being lost.

Cruz sings in two directions at once, to the past and the future, weeping for both. And if on first viewing you don't fully understand why she feels as she does, you weep for her anyway, just because she's there, in the present, alive. You, as her audience, help to make her so.

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