Boobies!

The wet smack of kisses on cheeks. Breast and ass shots that would get a straight director booed. An acceptance of telenovela melodrama as a domestic inevitability. Thanks to an excellent cast, Volver exerts a stronger tug on the memory, especially in its rather chilling delineation of our familial responsibilities. While it's obvious that Irene (Carmen Maura) loves daughter Sole (Lola Dueñas), it's somewhat monstrous for Americans of a certain age to accept the phlegmatic manner in which Sole takes care of her mother as if she had no life of her own except as the proprietor of a clandestine beauty parlor. Despite the ease with which this sixty-year-old woman slips under the bed or gets off on the smell of her own farts, Maura's Irene is far from likable, a pre-Franco anachronism casually indifferent to how she upsets her daughters' lives, and unwilling to confront caretaker Agustina (Blanca Portillo)'s sexual ambiguity (Portillo, shot and lit like Falconetti's Joan of Arc, gives a finely shaded performance as a woman made insufferable by charity).