This document provides an analysis of the film "Volver" and discusses several key themes: 1) It examines the film's treatment of women, including the objectification of women and how some characters see the comatose women as people rather than objects. 2) It analyzes the symbolic importance of the dance sequences that bookend the film and the different emotional reactions they elicit. 3) It discusses how the film depicts the tragedy of what befalls the two main female characters and how this allows the story of the friendship and loss of the two male characters to unfold. 4) It looks at how the film communicates through the animated bodies of the two women and how their states change before

1. Cynthia Freeland: Chapter 5
‘Nothing is simple’
‘Talk to her’

2. Treatment of women:
 Problem of objectification: held by feminists that
men tend to “objectify” women, treats her as an
object and not a subject. Feminists complain that
men regard women as mere bodies to be
observed or used for sexual pleasure, rather than
a person in their own right.
 Benigno sees the two comatose patients as
actual people (not mere bodies) and that they are
still the women they were and have larger
potential as human beings.

3. Treatment of women: continued
 Rape: complicates our moral reaction, pregnancy
doesn’t appear a miracle. Clearly wrong, Benigno
emerges as a monster (different understanding of
what is really wrong with objectification).
 Develop a relationship as viewers and audience
members to these women: both to the characters
depicted and the actresses who portray them,
through a visual and kinaesthetic awareness of
their bodies (audience response).

4. The dance sequences:
 Important to the narrative and symbolically
 It starts and ends with a dance sequence:
process of watching and understanding the
artistic portrayal, doesn't have any real closure.
 The mood is very sombre.
 The opening scene: symbolically, it foreshadows
the film’s suffering and sadness, mainly for
women but also the desperate attempts of men to
save them. Film’s male leads will struggle to love
and to care for these women.
 Different reactions to dance: Marco shows
intense emotion (weeping), and Benigno is
observant and empathetic.

5. The dance sequences: continued
 The mood at the end: narratively and
metaphorically far more optimistic and positive
than at the film’s beginning, despite the tragedies
that have occurred in the course of the story.
 Katerina (dance teacher): she says that
ballerinas will represent the souls of the men.
 Almodovar shows the women actresses who
‘inhabit’ their bodies so fully during their scenes
of living animation before becoming comatose, in
order to dramatise the terrible difference in their
states before and after. Heightens fear and pity
for them.

6. Tragedy:
 Befall of the two women but also the end of
helping to unfold the tragedy of the two men.
 The women become blank and unconscious,
unanimated bodies in order that the story of the
men’s friendship and tragic loss can itself unfold.
 Male friendship and men trying to know and
understand women (authenticity in human
relationships).
 Katerina: “world of art, nothing is simple”
referring Alicia and Marco’s relationship
beginning. It won’t be easy for them when Alicia
finds out that Marco was friends with Benigno
who spied on her and raped her.

7. The animated body:
 Communication through their bodies: Alicia
and Lydia. Lydia puts herself in danger with
bullfighting (risk-taker), whereas Alicia is the
opposite so she could be seen as gentle
through the use of ballet.
 Alicia’s raping is monstrous: helps explain
why Marco confesses that he now finds
Lydia’s body ‘disgusting’. Her body is like a
shell, its not “her” anymore.
 The two men treat the two women differently:
have different ideas about the females
vegetative state.

8. The challenge of interpretation:
 After the film that Benigno goes to see we see
the lava lamp in an extreme close-up as the
blobs move around in the liquid. Audience
members could see this as a hint that Alicia is
now pregnant because the scene before with the
film is also a metaphor for what Benigno has
done.
 Possibly be the saddest moment when Benigno
tells Marco “I haven’t had many hugs in my life”.
Marco hasn’t had any more direct emotional
contact with someone than Benigno has. But the
positive outcome of long tragedy: Marco may
have learned that in life, as in art, nothing is