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So, a lot of the posts I have made have been about pregnancy, or about celebrity mothers of toddlers. I want to talk about parenting/motherhood in the context of older children. There are three things I think I want to talk about: I want to talk about the movie Volver, I want to talk about Meredith’s mother and stepmother on Grey’s Anatomy, and I want to talk about the Alec Baldwin/Kim Basinger custody battle that is all over the tabloids lately. This post will be about Volver.

Almodovar’s film Volver focuses a lot on mother/daughter relationships (so do a lot of films, but I want to talk about this one today). The movie really focuses a lot on Penelope Cruz’s character’s (Raimunda) and her sister’s (Sole) relationships with their mother. At the beginning of the movie, they believe their mother is dead, that she died in a housefire. The two sisters and Penelope Cruz’s daughter (Paula) go back to the town where she died to visit their dying aunt, where they begin to notice that, oddly, in spite of her blindness and incapacity the aunt still appears to be able to cook, clean, maintain the house, etc. After the death of the aunt, the mother reveals herself to Sole (who thinks she is a ghost) and prepares to return to live with Sole in Madrid. In spite of her fear, Sole embraces the chance to be with her mother, laughing with her and happy to have the chance to be with her again.

We learn, however, that the reason the mother has “come back” is to deal with her issues with Raimunda, who hates her. The relationship between Sole and her mother is an example, I suppose, of what a mother-adult daughter relationship ought to be. As the movie progresses, Raimunda realizes her mother is back and we see their relationship change- we don’t really see that she hates her mother, just that she has reservations about it. In the end of the film we learn why: Raimunda was raped by her father, and she thought that her mother ought to have protected her- and her mother admits that this is true. Her mother admits that having learned about the sexual abuse, she started the fire that killed her husband and a woman that was presumed to be herself but was really her husband’s lover.

Meanwhile, Raimunda and her daughter Paula have their own issues. Raimunda’s husband Paco tries to seduce Paula, and Paula winds up killing him. Because of her own experiences with sexual abuse, Raimunda immediately forgives her daughter and helps her hide the body, clean up the blood, and later get rid of the corpse. Although Paco is not really Paula’s father (Raimunda’s father is, as Paula was the product of the sexual abuse), Raimunda is horrified at his behavior and comforts her traumatized daughter.

So what can we do with all of this? Is it fair to say that it is a mother’s responsibility to protect her daughters from sexual violence? Is Raimunda’s blaming her mother for the sexual abuse inflicted by her father fair? Even if it isn’t fair, it’s realistic. Mothers ARE expected to protect their daughters. Raimunda’s treatment of her daughter Paula shows the unconditional love and protection that a mother is supposed to feel for her daughter. Or does it? Is Raimunda supposed to be seen as overreacting? Is she taking her own experiences too much into account and forgiving something she shouldn’t forgive in her daughter? Or is trauma, particularly sexual violence, something so big that there is no “right” way to react or deal? I don’t know how to answer this, but the movie clearly shows examples of mother-daughter relationships that are a little bit different and harder to get at due to the extremeness of their circumstances.

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Filed under almodovar, mother-daughter relationships, parent's responsibilities, penelope cruz, sexual abuse, volver