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DVD
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Woman on the Perpetual Verge
Penélope Cruz is finally set to turn heads on DVD with her Golden Globe-nominated turn in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007 at 11:15 AM
By Brent Simon
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John Sciulli/WireImage.com
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Cruz at a recent Dolce & Gabbana charity event
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In the film career of an actor, as in life, context and timing are paramount. Take, for instance, the curious case of Penélope Cruz.
After making a striking impression in 1992’s wartime romance Belle Epoque, Cruz worked dutifully and in fulfilling fashion in Spanish cinema for a number of years. She collaborated with Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar before he became (all over again) a really hot American arthouse commodity, and headlined Alejandro Amenábar’s striking 1997 film Abre Los Ojos. Turns in Fernando Trueba’s The Girl of Your Dreams and Almodóvar’s All About My Mother caught the attention of critics and casting directors, only cementing her status as a rising star. Awards nominations flowed during this period; beautiful and vulnerable, Cruz was regarded as an ingénue who could actually act.
Then Cruz came west, across the Atlantic. Beginning in the late summer of 2000, I received a series of breathlessly effusive phone messages and emails regarding Fina Torres’ Woman on Top, a whimsical comedy starring Cruz as a Brazilian chef who, ironically, relocates to San Francisco. “We’d love to arrange an interview with Penélope Cruz,” the publicists always said. “She’s going to be a big star. Let us know what you need.”
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Richard Lewis/WireImage.com
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Almodovar, accepting Best European Film at the 2006 European Film Awards
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I certainly didn’t need a primer on Cruz’s career thus far, and was game for a feature on her and the film, which we arranged. But later in the fall, Woman on Top didn’t make much of a splash outside the top five markets, pulling in just under $5 million — perfectly nice for many niche indie titles, but disappointing considering the double-barreled approach Fox Searchlight had taken in marketing the film.
For various reasons, Cruz’s next three projects - All the Pretty Horses, the inert Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Blow - all also flamed out at the box office, with many of the critical knocks on the former two specifically dinging her reputation as well. She was being seen as just another exotic flavor-of-the-week.
Then, in late 2001, came Vanilla Sky, Cameron Crowe’s remake of Abre Los Ojos. The tabloid-ready heat from her what-do-you-know relationship with star Tom Cruise fueled a re-ignition and further rise in stature for Cruz, but not necessarily of the good kind. In America, at least, she was, most charitably, famous for being famous — another eye-candy starlet gracing a string of magazine covers. In other (maybe even most) circles, Cruz was simply that other woman who was around when Cruise kicked poor Nicole Kidman to the curb.
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Gregg DeGuire/WireImage.com
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Back in the day...
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Cruz certainly did far fewer films during the two-plus years of her relationship with Cruise, and those that she did do — like Masked & Anonymous and Gothika — hardly brought her acclaim. And so her reputation receded. People began to think of Cruz as just another beautiful face from those ubiquitous Estée Lauder ads. With her Golden Globe-nominated turn in this week's new DVD Volver (Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama), however, that’s beginning to change, and it’s not just a coincidence that the praise comes for a movie again pairs Cruz with Almodóvar, and finds her working in her native tongue.
Anchored by its calm, matter-of-fact tone, Volver centers on Raimunda (Cruz), a hard-working, dutiful, blue-collar mother who tries to cover up the murder of her lay-about husband Paco (Antonio de la Torre) by her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) after she fends off a drunken, lecherous advance of his with a knife. That’s only one small part of the story, though, as Raimunda opens up a restaurant, while her hairdresser sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) welcomes with open arms the apparent ghost of their mother, Irene (Carmen Maura), who perished four years earlier in a fire. With unfinished business, Irene soon pays Raimunda a visit as well.
In interviews, Almodóvar has described Volver as a blend of Casablanca director Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce and Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace, which is to say essentially urgent but wry. Stylistically, there are a few faint elements of noir scattered throughout, but Almodóvar trades in this mode seemingly not out of any filmmaking nostalgia, but rather to counterbalance the soapier, operatic rudiments of the plot. Mixing the poignant with the absurd, the result is an affectionate and perfectly “lived-in” movie about family, duty and love’s binds, anchored wonderfully by Cruz.
Volver is also proof positive that Cruz is an actress who best makes sense within the context and confines of her native culture; it’s here that she seems most comfortable and alive, be it playing either alluring or melancholic characters. Cruz’s English language films have by and large turned her into a bauble, and while part of that is certainly in the respective writing of these pieces, it comes through in the performances too. Even those movies in which she affects a full-blown arc — like Blow’s temptress-turned-harridan, for instance — Cruz seems less unique, less vibrant, less memorable.
Thankfully, English isn’t her only language. Here’s to many more Spanish returns…
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