The 2006 film with which Penélope Cruz made history at the Oscars was the first in which the director from La Mancha and Carmen Maura worked together after 18 years.
It may not be Pedro Almodóvar’s best film, but what sure it is Return It is one of the best Spanish films in history.. Tape, released in 2006gave Penelope Cruz her First Best Actress nomination at the Oscars which also allowed her to make history: she was the first Spanish actress to do so. In the end, she did not take it (as a curiosity: that year the winner was Helen Mirren for her role as Queen Elizabeth II of her in The Queen), but it was the first of the three that would come later and perhaps the most special.
With Returnboth Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz regained notoriety in the eyes of Hollywood after the success of Everything about my mother (1999), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2000. The filmmaker had already tasted international success again before at the hands of Talk to her in 2002 -nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, and winner of the latter-, but Penélope did not participate in the film. Previously, Return it had triumphed at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and the Goya Awards, being, in short, one of the most outstanding feature films in Spanish cinema.
More than $85.5 million raised worldwide, Return became -and still is- the highest grossing film in Almodóvar’s filmography and, although the previous two lead, along with The Skin I Live In, the ranking of the best valued films by the Manchego filmmaker, the reality is that it also deserves to be considered one of his best works. Today, Friday, February 10, 2023RTVE will broadcast Return in your main chain, the 1and we can’t think of a better time to see her again.
Starring, in addition to Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura and Lola Dueñas, among others, Return is the story of Raimunda (Cruz), a woman who lives humbly in her town with her daughter in her teens and her husband, who is unemployed. Her older sister is Sole (Dueñas) and her mother Irene (Maura) died in a terrible fire that usually takes place in the area, but she unexpectedly reappears before Raimunda and some other people… Just as they are dealing with a family crisis pretty serious.
To tell more would be to reveal too much but Returneven with its drama, manages to become quite a comical story with which Pedro Almodóvar demonstrates, once again, that he moves like a fish in water in that duality.
With ReturnAlso, Pedro Almodóvar he was finally working again with what was one of his great muses in his first stage as a director, Carmen Maurawith whom I had not worked for 18 years. The film was the finishing touch to a well-known dispute that they had solved years before, but after which they stopped working together for almost two decades. and that kept them apart as friends also for several years.
The last time that Pedro Almodóvar and Carmen Maura had worked together had been in Women at the edge of a nervous attackundoubtedly one of the best of the director and that many would take directly to the Top 1 without hesitation, in 1988. Although the film turned out to be an absolute success with great praise for both, it was also the beginning of the tension between the filmmaker and the actress , whose relationship broke up in a public and notorious way. “I have problems with Carmen that come from afar. I thought they could be solved, but it has not been the case”, confirmed Almodóvar to The country after some events and rudeness that had not gone unnoticed by the press.
A year later, Pedro Almodóvar dedicated some beautiful words to Maura in a speech at the Goya Awards gala, but he had previously told a publication some details about his riff-raff that had not yet come to light when he did. Whether that had consequences or not is not known, but the truth is that those who were thick and thin they remained quite estranged for an entire decade. At the beginning of the 2000s, after the success of Todo sobre mi madre, some cross praise and their reunion on a set of the program Spanish versionbegan to occur a rapprochement between the two that would reach its peak with the news that Almodóvar would direct Maura again in Return.
A reunion with what had been his quintessential muse, which did not go unnoticed and which generated even more expectation if possible for the director’s new film. However, the expected collaboration, despite the success of the tape, not only did not lead to more in the future, but in the following years there were some more tensions and some controversial statements on both sides, especially Maura’s. The actress herself admitted that she did not believe that she would ever work with Almodóvar again and she did, but Between the two, to this day, respect and mutual admiration prevail.
