Agustina tells the three she has heard Aunt Paula talking to Sole and Raimunda’s mother as though she were alive. Another “return.”įrightened, Sole tells no one, and the three women go on to Agustina’s house across the little street-in this village, neighbors count as one of the family. The actress playing her is Carmen Maura, one of Almodóvar’s favorites, working with him again after seventeen years of estrangement. This ghost-mother is Irene (her name means “peace”). She speaks of Raimunda and Sole’s mother as though she were alive, and Sole, when she goes upstairs, sees her mother’s picture and apparently smells something on an incongruous exercise bike. The first three go to visit Raimunda’s and Sole’s mother’s sister, ancient Aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave in glasses for cataracts that weirdly magnify her eyes). (It is a custom in this village to buy your burial plot and tend it during your lifetime.) The point of the scene is death, and in the village the dead form part of the lives of the living. A spinster, she will clean her own grave. (The film’s date is 2006.) A friend, close-cropped, gray Agustina (Blanca Portillo) passes by. These three are cleaning the grave of Raimunda and Sole’s mother and father, “burned alive” in 2002. Almodóvar closes in on three women: Raimunda (Penélope Cruz), her teenage daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo), and Raimunda’s sister Sole or Soledad (Lola Dueñas)-her name means “alone,” and she is. The opening shot shows us village women cleaning the graves in a cemetery-a local custom.
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