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A film that gradually built in emotional intensity, then left me in an absolute puddle at the end. The main character is a beautiful, chic 60-something year old woman, played by Yoon Jeong-hee, who came out retirement for the role. Her character is active, takes care of her grandson alone, and is still curious to tap into new experiences in life, taking a class to learn how to write poetry. While there is supreme joy and grace in her seeing the world in deeper, more thoughtful ways, she gets two heartbreaking bits of news: (1) she has early stage Alzheimer's, and (2), even worse, her grandson was one of six boys who raped a classmate for six months, resulting in the girl committing suicide.

Words can't begin to describe the devastation she feels, but Yoon and director Lee Chang-dong are both absolutely masterful in the restraint they exercise in what follows. One of the most infuriating things is how the fathers of the five other boys are working with the victim's mother to try to pay her off so that their futures won't be ruined, and the school is also motivated to cover the whole thing up, so the grandmother is pressured into playing ball and coming up with money she doesn't have. The fact that the actions of the boys never comes up in these conversations is outrageous, something the viewer certainly feels, but Lee just gives us glimpses of the turmoil, like that extraordinary stare between the mother and grandmother through a window, or when the grandmother is near the bridge the girl jumped from and her poetry journal fills with nothing but raindrops.

There is obviously a juxtaposition of one of the most beautiful aspects of humanity (writing poetry) with its most heinous acts (rape, and indifference to suffering) at play here. There is also a disturbing parallel to the adolescent boy's horrific behavior in a stroke victim the grandmother cares for - he pops a viagra pill unbeknownst to her before she bathes him one night in the hope that she'll have sex with him, something she recoils from. I can't say I really liked the direction that subplot took, or the fact that the grandmother didn't call the boy's mother immediately about what was happening, but it didn't matter. The grandmother struggling to write poetry and learning how to do so by embracing pain, processing feelings that were previously inexpressible through any other means than weeping, led to a finish that was absolutely devastating. Just a brilliant, haunting film, one with real staying power. It brought to mind this haiku from Basho:

"Come, see real flowers of this painful world."

There are certainly things to like about this film - the setting, beautiful Barcelona and Oviedo, a star-studded cast, and a great soundtrack, filled with Spanish guitar. There are some fantastic performances from Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz especially, who are incredibly natural in their emotional scenes, and it's an engaging story too. This isn't really a comedy, it's a relationship film, one where Woody Allen explores alternate lifestyles and more centrally, the tradeoff between settling for someone "nice" vs. Going for someone who makes your heart pound, with dangers shown at either extreme.

What stopped me from loving it completely was that Allen's writing felt less sharp here, and I'm not sure I ever really bought Scarlett Johansson's character being the missing "it" in the relationship between Bardem and Cruz's, or just how much all three women (Rebecca Hall playing the third) revolved around him for that matter. Something was off there, and the story fizzled down the stretch (the last scene with the gun seemed especially silly). On an aesthetic note, I also didn't care for the narration from Christopher Evan Welch, or the yellow cast to the cinematography that I've noticed elsewhere from Allen, which to me makes beautiful places and people look less natural, not warmer. All in all, not a bad film though.

Such a touching, feminist film, one with women supporting and helping each other in so many ways. And it's Almodóvar, so of course it's also gorgeous and vibrant, with colors and beautiful patterns popping. Tension comes between two sisters because they're each harboring a secret: Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) is covering up for her daughter having killed her husband out of self-defense (with the corpse now in a meat freezer), and Soledad (Lola Dueñas) has the ghost of her mother living in her house, having run into her at her aunt's funeral. Beneath the surface of these strong women, there are also secrets from the past, sometimes betrayed with marvelously subtle emotions. The fact that the film deals so deftly with fathers committing maybe the most heinous act imaginable, sexually abusing their own daughters, and the resilience of women in the face of that, is fantastic. Oh, and it was also a treat to hear Cruz sing the title song, whose lyrics are:

"I'm afraid of the encounter with the past that's coming back to confront my life. I'm afraid of the nights that, filled with memories, enchain my dreams. But the fleeing traveler sooner or later must come to a halt, and even though oblivion, which destroys everything, has killed my old illusions, I still retain a humble hope hidden away, and that is all of my heart's fortune. Coming back (Volver), with a wrinkled forehead and the snows of time silvering my brow, feeling that life is an instant, that 20 years is nothing, that the feverish eyes wandering in the shadows seek you and name you, living with my soul clinging to a sweet memory that I weep for again."