Remapping Latin America onto Spain

Almodóvar's 2006 film Volver (2006) is the product of an intense period in which the Spanish filmmaker's production company, El Deseo, actively engaged in a series of strategic co-productions with Latin American producers. These were more than simply efforts at commercial opportunism, and rather reflected Almodóvar's long-standing connections to Latin America that date back to his early career when he regularly included actors and songs from the region in his films. What had once seemed like random motifs, now retrospectively come into focus in this film as part of a more ambitious transterritorial aesthetic that seeks to engage audiences in both Spain and Latin America in what the cultural critic Néstor García Canclini describes as the co-production of a transnational Hispanic identity. As I will argue in this chapter, Volver is a pivotal work both within Almodóvar's filmography and in bringing to light the cultural dynamic that informs El Deseo's larger Latin American project.

That process is given self-referential prominence in the film when Penélope Cruz sings the title song, an Argentine tango, at a party she has been hired to cater for a film crew shooting in her gritty Madrid neighbourhood. On one level the musical performance seems misplaced in what has been up to this point a grim melodrama of domestic violence and the struggles of the urban poor. Yet, her performance is motivated as the Cruz character, Raimunda, hears guitar chords and recalls events from her childhood associated with her mother, thus prompting her to sing the tango.