‘Your town,’ the TV presenter says to her guest on a live talk show, ‘has the highest incidence of insanity in the whole of Spain. Do you think this fact explains the story you are about to tell us?’ The guest, as it happens, isn’t about to tell a story at all, since she suddenly decides not to spill her local beans and walks off the set. But we’re already laughing at the mock sociology of the question, and since it occurs about two-thirds of the way through Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, Volver, we know better than to take it as mere filling, or even as offering any sort of information. First, because there are probably any number of towns in Spain that could compete for the title; and second, because we don’t want to align ourselves with the presenter’s smug rationality. But do we want to align ourselves with superstition?
It’s a long way from Buñuel to Almodóvar, but I thought of Buñuel several times as I watched this film. Both directors are interested in an idea of Spain, which they see as a place caught between myth and history, or more precisely as a country trying to enter history without fully taking the measure of myth. In Viridiana the progressive projects of Don Jaime’s nephew are as abstract and fantastic as the heroine’s charity, in or out of the convent. Buñuel thinks the myths – the love of death, the lure of the past, the dream of purity – have to be exorcised before anything can happen, and ignoring them is as bad as caressing them. Almodóvar is more genial, and believes the myths may respond to friendly mockery, and could even be got to do a little work. At a wake in Volver a crowd of women hover round a young woman, who is disturbed by the sheer clustering energy of this traditional presence. A high-angle shot makes them look like a tight geometrical pattern, or a wheel, society as a repetitive machine. For a moment what flickers here is the shade not of Buñuel but of Lorca, and specifically The House of Bernarda Alba, a play in which matriarchy is an image of Spain itself. Then the gloom and anxiety are dispersed, but the national story on offer in these works does seem to be all about somebody’s mother, or mother superior.
The story the guest nearly tells, and that we have already learned from the movie, concerns the interesting double meaning of the title: ‘to return’, meaning both to go back, as a person does who needs to revisit her past, and to come back, as a ghost does who arrives to haunt the present. The title also sounds as if it might be the name of a sentimental song, and it is; sung by Estrella Morente and mimed by Penelope Cruz in the middle of the story. ‘Ghosts don’t cry’ are almost the last words of the film, and a lot of its delicately kitschy and genuinely moving implications are in the idea. Ghosts don’t cry because they can’t. Because they don’t need to. Because they don’t exist. Ghosts don’t cry but they should.
The film opens with a wonderful scene in a provincial cemetery. Bright sunlight, high wind. Cheerful choral tune on the soundtrack. A group of women, whom we soon discover to be Raimunda (Penelope Cruz), her sister Sole and Raimunda’s daughter Paula, are cleaning a large tomb, scraping off leaves and dirt, scrubbing and polishing. The camera pans a little; then some more; then a lot. The whole cemetery is full of women cleaning tombs. The pan ends on a chunk of marble which now fills the screen. The titles come up against this background, notably ‘Volver’ in thick red letters.
The women make a couple of visits in the small town, which establish the back-story. Raimunda’s and Sole’s parents died in a fire two and half years ago. They have an aged aunt who says she has seen the dead mother. The aunt herself seems too out of it to be living alone and managing as well as she does, and although we don’t learn this right away, it becomes clear that the whole town, including the aunt’s neighbour Agustina, the person who almost told the story on TV, believes the mother’s ghost is helping the old lady out. Agustina’s own mother disappeared around the time of the fire. Raimunda and her companions return, in the literal, mundane sense, to Madrid, and the film dives into a brisk mix of old Hollywood melodrama and new Spanish soap, with a glance at Italian neo-realism before everything got so campy. Late in the film, the person taken to be the mother’s ghost sits before a TV set, contentedly watching Anna Magnani in Visconti’s Bellissima.
There is an attempted rape, a murder, a body dumped in a freezer, left there for much of the movie, and finally buried, freezer and all, by the bank of a distant river. Raimunda, who already has three cleaning jobs to make ends meet, takes up a career as a caterer, and borrows the empty restaurant next door to serve lunches to a film crew working in the neighbourhood. The aged aunt dies in the small town. Raimunda can’t go to the funeral, but Sole attends, and comes back with her mother’s ghost in the back of the car. She doesn’t know this until she has parked the car in Madrid and hears a thumping noise as she starts to walk away. A distinctly unghostly voice says, ‘Open up, it’s your mother,’ and a distinctly unghostly Carmen Maura is revealed lying in the boot, cramped and untidy. Sole overcomes her fear and takes her mother home.
Of course it crosses your mind – well, it crossed mine and I don’t think I’m going to be alone in this – that it’s a strange ghost that needs transport and can’t pass through a solid surface when it wants to, let alone one that looks so scruffily, physically mortal that the first thing she needs to do in her new life is to get her straggly grey hair dyed a decent brown. But hey, it’s only a movie, we’ve heard of magic realism, and maybe this is Almodóvar’s cinematic joke: ghosts don’t cry, but actors photograph like people. We have no reason, beyond our own pedestrian suspicions, to think the mother is not a ghost. At this point a brilliant and tender double-take begins, although we can’t know this until close to the end of the movie, and I can’t discuss it without revealing the plot. Stop reading here if you haven’t guessed where things are going. The actual turn of the plot isn’t the point, though. The point is what the turn makes us feel and how it invites us to think.
The movie settles down into a picture of weird but stable working life. Raimunda hustles with her catering, hires a van and buries the body, goes back to catering. It’s a characteristic Almodóvar touch that there is no suspense about any of this. The body is a grisly and awkward comic object, but not a source of danger – unless of course its owner were to return from the dead. Raimunda buys some rope and tape to seal the freezer. The shopkeeper hands them over. ‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘And a pick and a shovel.’ Mild surprise from the shopkeeper, nothing more. Meanwhile the mother’s ghost helps Sole with her hairdressing business, and makes friends with her granddaughter, although Raimunda knows nothing of any of this.
The crunch comes when Agustina, who is dying of cancer, decides the only way to find out what happened to her missing mother is to ask the dead – namely, Raimunda’s mother – and begs Raimunda to do this. Raimunda thinks Agustina is crazy, and we wonder what Raimunda is going to do when she comes to know what we know. Then Raimunda drops in on Sole, smells a trace of her mother in the bathroom – all family farts are odorous in their own way – and discovers her hiding under the bed. Raimunda stamps off, in a rage with her mother for reasons we can’t imagine – although we do know they were estranged for many years. Then Raimunda goes back and she and her mother talk. Early on in the conversation Raimunda says: ‘You’re not a ghost, are you?’ The mother smiles sadly, shakes her head. Reason returns, but radically altered by its long spell of legend and/or insanity.
I don’t need to describe the now unfolding details of an earlier murder, an even earlier rape and a whole heap of unforgiven family history. It’s all too much and too little, the material of sensationalist newspapers and weepy movies. And it’s all just right, since it works through the clichés rather than just with them or just against them. This is good news, since Almodóvar, once the master of an edgy dialogue with sentimentality, in High Heels, for example, has recently – especially in All About My Mother – been giving the dialogue a miss. Beneath the weepy surface there has been only more weeping. In brief, Raimunda’s mother didn’t die, but Agustina’s mother did; and the film ends with Raimunda’s mother, a live woman whom a whole town thinks is a ghost, impersonating a ghost in order to care for the dying Agustina. In this perspective life and survival are harsh realities and optional spirit forms: working fantasies, available stories.
The acting is remarkable throughout the film, perfectly realistic, mildly bemused, as if the characters themselves had started out in early Visconti and got lost on their way to Douglas Sirk. Raimunda is a great role for Penelope Cruz, cloyingly sweet in every other movie of hers I’ve seen. Tight skirts, fast walk, gleaming eyes, she means business every minute of the film, whatever the business is. She is like a smaller, fiercer version of the Anna Magnani we see in the film clip on TV. And Almodóvar’s direction is discreet and funny, self-conscious without going quite as far as irony. Before all the violence and melodrama starts, Raimunda is washing up the dishes in the kitchen. A sudden shot from directly overhead shows her handsome cleavage and a large kitchen knife. We’ve already seen the drunken husband staring at Paula’s crotch, and we know what this frame means: male desire and female resistance. We and the camera are the person ogling the breasts and the person who will pick up the knife. In fact Almodóvar is showing us only the elements of such a story, a displaced prophecy. It isn’t Raimunda who picks up the knife, although if anyone ever asks, she will say it was. This careful use of an overdetermined theme allows us both to recognise the territory and to catch the ghost of the actual emotions that melodrama so often blurs into mush.
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It is the time for death in Lebanon. Anyone who has followed the country’s modern history might well be confused. In 2000 Lebanon’s resistance expelled the Israeli army from the land it had occupied in the south. A popular intifada expelled the Syrian army in 2005. How could a minor military operation undertaken by Hizbullah send Lebanon back to square one? We seem to be entering a labyrinth from which nobody can find the way out. The only certainty is that Lebanon is facing destruction, that the dream of restoring the country to independence is on hold.
In 1978 Israel devastated Lebanon and established a military cordon in order to protect its northern settlements from the PLO’s Katyusha rockets. The country became the site of a series of wars, invasions and retreats. Then in 1982 Israel, under the leadership of Menachem Begin, decided that a decisive victory was necessary. Armoured columns invaded Lebanon, and reached the outskirts of Beirut. The objective was to get the Palestinians out of the way and to end their hopes of creating an independent state. Yasir Arafat and his men were forced to leave Lebanon by sea and go into exile in Tunisia.
With the massacres in the camps of Sabra and Shatila, the Israelis visited new humiliations on the Arab world. They were convinced that the confrontation on their northern border was over, and that their armies had managed not only to end the threat against them, but also to subjugate the Palestinians and the Lebanese. It didn’t work out like that. Arafat moved to Ramallah, where he would become the first Palestinian leader after the nakba of 1948 to live until his last days in his homeland, and the Israeli army was forced to withdraw from Lebanon.
Why has the battle between Hizbullah and the Israeli army assumed such proportions now? The question is of course bound up with all the other questions surrounding the Palestine problem, and bound up too with the oil wealth in the Middle East that has become a curse.
Lebanon emerged as a distinct entity after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The state founded in Damascus by King Faisal I after the end of the First World War was supposed to include Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, but then Palestine became a British mandate, and the Zionist movement took over there. After the Second World War and the end of the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon, both countries became independent, but Syria seemed to lose its identity, unsure whether it should ally itself with Iraq or join a political union with Egypt. Then in 1963 there was a Baathist coup in Syria, and Hafiz Assad, an air-force officer, triumphed in the subsequent power struggle, becoming president in 1971. Assad extended his sphere of influence to Lebanon and turned it into a pivot of regional politics during the latter stage of the Cold War.
Lebanon was unaffected by the military revolutions in the Arab East after 1948. It was an oasis of cultural freedom in a region dominated by revolutionary military regimes. It was also the region’s weak spot, vulnerable to outside influence, since the religious diversity of its citizens meant that it was difficult for the state fully to control internal security or foreign policy. There were severe strains in the first years of independence, reaching a climax in 1958 with the surge in Arab nationalism which resulted from Nasser’s influence. A small-scale civil war that year ended in an Egyptian-American settlement after US marines landed in Lebanon.
Since 1978 Lebanon has been subjected to five Israeli invasions, each aimed at destroying rockets: in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006. On each occasion the Israeli army fought only against semi-organised Palestinian and Lebanese militias. Did the Israelis score a victory in 1982? You couldn’t call it that, not after the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, nor could you call 1993 a victory, involving as it did the recognition of the PLO. After Israel’s 2000 withdrawal under fire, during which the inhabitants of northern Israel were required to live in shelters as rockets were launched by Hizbullah, that description seemed even less appropriate.
A war but not a war, because the aggressors did not acknowledge the existence of the other side, until the Palestinians agreed to what was tantamount to surrender at Oslo. But they did not in the end surrender, and Israel took advantage of the attacks of 9/11 to bring down the Palestinians’ more moderate leaders. This led to total chaos in occupied Gaza and the West Bank. The violence that has engulfed Lebanon today is part of this pattern. When Palestinians in Gaza succeeded in capturing one of Israel’s soldiers, Israel refused the logic of reciprocity. Instead it has plunged Gaza into a state of lethal anarchy. Israel refuses to exchange prisoners because it sees Hamas and Hizbullah as terrorists. The problem in Gaza and the West Bank is clear: Israel wants to create cages and ghettos for Palestinians. In Lebanon the situation is more complex.
The Israelis say they do not want to occupy Lebanon. This is also what the Americans say about Iraq. The issue, however, is not what they want but what they are doing. Can Israel tolerate religious and ethnic chaos on its borders? Is it performing a service to the United States by trying to weaken Hizbullah, Iran’s strongest ally in the region, prior to the opening up of the Iranian nuclear file? What is clear, beneath the drone of the missiles hurled at the southern suburbs of Beirut, is that Israel, realising it is incapable of destroying Hizbullah, has decided to destroy Lebanon. But the madness is not just Israeli. Much of the Arab world is following the road to self-destruction, via a fundamentalist ideology that, perhaps unwittingly, reflects the worldview of Bernard Lewis’s disciples, the neo-orientalists.
Lebanon is caught between Israel’s strategy and Syria’s. Israel, like the wolf in sheep’s clothing in Aesop’s fable, has taken on the role of the victim. But Israel also claims that its prey is not a sheep but a wolf, and it’s certainly true that Israel forces it to act like a wolf.
Syria’s strategy, fashioned by the late President Assad and used whenever his regime was under threat, can be understood by adapting the story of Abraham and Isaac. Syria needs a lamb to sacrifice instead of a son. If necessary, it will appear to protect the lamb, making the lamb seem to be wolf-like, even as it waits to be sacrificed.
Lebanon has been caught between these two strategies for thirty years. But now there are new actors on stage: the US and Iran. In the 1980s, the Americans encouraged Iraq to contain Iran by means of a crushing war, just as they gave Syria the task of imposing peace on Lebanon. The fear now is that the US has given Israel a green light to destroy Lebanon. The Iranians adopted sensible policies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and have been the sole beneficiaries of the turmoil of the American war. Iraq has more or less collapsed into their hands: with the withdrawal of the US and British armies it will become a civil war zone directed by Tehran. Afghanistan is permanently on the edge of an abyss. Iran exploits this by trying to destabilise America’s allies in the region. The way the United States and Iran behave on the battlefront in Lebanon will decide the fate not just of Lebanon, but of the whole of the Middle East.
It has been clear during the first days of the confrontation that Hizbullah has prepared for conflict in a manner that has aroused admiration in a region where wars with Israel have resulted only in frustration. It is clear that Hizbullah’s weapons are not only intended for the defence of Lebanon but are being held in reserve for a greater battle, a battle to defend Iranian nuclear weapons. Lebanon has to join the battle against Israel not because it wants to, not because there are still Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails, but because the only options Israel offers the Arab Middle East are to submit or to collaborate in the crushing of the Palestinians.
This is not to defend Hizbullah’s military strategy, or a Syrian vision that is based on exporting tension beyond its borders at the expense of the Lebanese and Palestinian people. An alternative strategy must emerge in the Arab world, before fundamentalism takes over everything, turning every Arab country into a site of battle and destruction. The last bastion of secular resistance, the PLO, has been destroyed. Perhaps Arafat made a mistake at Oslo, but a greater mistake was to allow the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, which meant that it was unable adequately to react to the rising tide of fundamentalism. A fresh vision based on justice, peace and democracy is needed. The problem is the influence of the Arab oil states, which are oligarchic both politically and culturally. Lebanon is today paying the price for their folly and impotence and their subordination to the United States.
I do not exonerate the Lebanese from responsibility for the horrors that are taking place. Building a democratic country is the duty of all Lebanese. The different religious groups have to find a way to unite in a political project. Factionalism and fear will make it impossible to confront the weapons that are destroying a country that has risen from the rubble only to find itself once again buried in rubble.
Before me I see the same images of death that I witnessed 24 years ago. The pictures themselves, the noise of invading aircraft in the skies of Beirut and all over Lebanon, are the same. Do I see or do I remember? When you are incapable of distinguishing between what is in front of you and what you remember, it becomes clear that history teaches nothing – and clear too that what the Israelis call war is not war but merely the first skirmishes of a war that has not yet begun. Woe to anyone who believes that this massacre is war. Since 1973, the Arab world has fought only on the sidelines.
The Israelis should take care not to deceive themselves and believe that they have achieved victory, because the nature of such non-wars is that they can be repeated over and over again.
Elias Khoury is director and editor-in-chief of the culture supplement of the Beirut daily An-Nahar. His most recently translated novel is Gate of the Sun. His piece in this issue was translated by Peter Clark.
Vol. 28 No. 15 dated 3 August 2006
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