A melancholic romance novelist moonlighting anonymously at a newspaper is told to review her own book, at the same time she's trying to move away from the romance genre. Refreshingly, it's more subdued than Almodovar's others in the sexuality department. It also has some characteristic flares of melodrama, like the confrontation between Amanda Gris, as she's known, and her husband, who's home on leave from the war in Bosnia. Almodovar also places it in historical context, showing the student protests about no jobs against Felipe, Prince of Asturias, the first son of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia. You don't always remember that other countries still have kings and queens, even if they don't really have any authoritah.
The film has value on its own, it might be most notable for its intriguing connections to the rest of Almodovar's oeuvre. Her agent describes her new novel for the series "True Love": "A novel about a mother who discovers her daughter's killed her father who had tried to rape her. And so that no one finds out hides the body in the cold-storage room of a neighbor's restaurant." We learn later it's called "Cold-Storage Room." "Volver" might be seen as the completion of that task, turning that plot into a quasi-romance appropriate for "True Love." But whereas Penelope Cruz's character does not need men, here the author believes she does. Also, the beginning features a filming of an instructional video, how doctors tell mothers their sons are brain dead and they can use the organs. The woman who plays the actress stars in the later film "All About My Mother" as the mother of a son who dies and who then falls in with some acting types. And Gris's mother is a recurrent actress, playing a senile elderly woman in several films, including "Volver." The house they go to in the village near the end looks like "Volver." So those are the connections I saw.
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