With its overwhelming richness, its colour and warmth, Pedro Almodóvar's new movie is set to capture your heart. Volver seemed guilelessly wonderful when I first saw it earlier this year in Cannes. Now it looks even better. The picture's ingenuities and contrivances just seem to float out of the screen, like psychedelic moodshapes. I found myself floating right along with them.

His last two films, Bad Education and Talk To Her, were impressive, though I never quite felt
the unconditional rapture of the true Almodóvar believer. This new film, being more modest in its scope, and somehow less obviously extravagant, achieves more with its rhetorical flourishes and narrative display. There is something so playful and gorgeous about it, and certainly something gorgeous about Penélope Cruz: although the film is notable in that romantic love is quite irrelevant. Cruz's beauty appears in an altogether different love-context: that of a mother's passionate love for her daughter.

Volver, (in English, Coming Home or Coming Back), is a gripping melodrama inspired by the trash TV that is a soundtrack to its characters' lives. Penélope Cruz is Raimunda, a hard-working woman with a teenage daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo), and a feckless, layabout husband. With her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) she tends to the graves of her parents, and visits her ailing Aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave), who is heartrendingly in the final stages of dementia. Raimunda's family life shatters with one terrible act of violence, and there is a secret about her late mother Irene (Carmen Maura) that surfaces when Irene returns from beyond the grave to make contact with her astonished daughters.

So Volver is a ghost story. Or is it? As the movie drifts along the periphery of the supernatural, I went into a trance, which Almodóvar induces with a master's confidence. All the movie's secrets are rolled out in a narrative design that is exuberant and elegant. Its cinematography and art direction, by José Luis Alcaine and Salvador Parra, give everything an intensity that, like previous Almodóvar films, has the feel of a Douglas Sirk film. Almodóvar has something of Sirk's passionate empathy with women, mixed with a gay sensibility - though the film is unlike Sirk's in that men are entirely marginal. In its vividness and intense, almost neurotic sensitivity to colour, particularly the colour red, it also looks like a Hitchcock thriller.

There is a wonderful overhead shot of Raimunda washing up a bloodstained knife in the kitchen sink. On the left of the screen, we see the implement of violence in the plastic bowl above the soiled plates, and on the right there is the glistening crown of Raimunda's glorious raven hair and her magnificent cleavage - the size of which her mother is later wonderingly to remark upon, and in which nestles an enamel miniature of the crucified Christ. The image goes beyond camp, and certainly beyond desire, into a feminised world in which work, survival and family love are paramount. A neighbour asks about the bloodstain on her neck, and quick-thinking Raimunda says it is merely "women's trouble": a laugh line that relieves the tension, but is also nothing more nor less than the truth.

When Cruz struts with unselfconscious sexiness through the streets, carrying a rounded, wiggling behind that might almost be prosthetic, she resembles the young Sophia Loren. She moves, however, without the soundtrack of wolf-whistles that earlier ages might have composed for her. There are a couple of men in the picture who are in love with Raimunda, but they are tentative and almost reticent in their adoration.
Her real relationship is with her daughter, her sister, her mother and with her garrulous women-friends and neighbours - all chattering, laughing and, at a funeral, mumbling prayers like a swarm of pious, black-clad bees. But of course, Cruz is intensely engaged with one man: Almodóvar himself, who manages to draw out her presence like a ductile material and spread it all over his movie. Only Cruz could have carried off those hoop earrings, as big as soup-plates, and on anyone else her black top with the flowery design might have looked as if it came from Primark. On her it looks sensational, and its floral motif is carried over into the final credit sequence.

It is this context of beauty, richly sensual without being sexual, that makes the gestures of tragicomedy and passion so affecting. When Raimunda says to her miraculously returned mother: "I don't know how I have lived all these years without you ..." it is absurd, and comic, but also intensely poignant. And as often in the past, Almodóvar makes a song a central moment in the film. Raimunda has abandoned her dreary day jobs to take over an absent friend's restaurant and cater for a visiting movie crew. Here, she impulsively decides to sing to the assembled company a showstopping lament about the return of past lives and loves - an irresistibly generous and emotional event.

No other director has as much swoon factor as Pedro Almodóvar: the texture of his movie-making is quite unique. Volver could have gone on for another hour or two: there seemed so much more to say. What a triumph for this great European director who just seems to get better and better.

Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz

It's six years since director Pedro Almodóvar and actor Penélope Cruz worked together on All About My Mother. They talk about the rehearsal process, their friendship and the many happy returns of their latest film, Volver

Maria Delgado: Penélope and Pedro, welcome. I'd like to start with a discussion about Volver. Volver in Spanish means to go back or to return. I think there's a sense of returning for both of you in this film - for you Pedro, returning to La Mancha and some of the themes of your earlier work, and to some of the stars, such as Carmen Maura and Penélope, with whom you haven't worked in a while. And for you, Penélope, a return to Spanish-language cinema and to working with Pedro. Perhaps you'd both like to talk to us about the sense of returning on this film.

Pedro Almodóvar (with Maria Delgado translating): In effect, there are many returns in this movie. The ones you mentioned - I returned to working with Carmen and Penélope, and I returned to my roots and shot there. In fact that was the main thing for me; that was really very moving, more so than I thought. And also the sense of coming back from beyond, in the character that Carmen Maura plays in the film. But also Volver, if you are familiar with Argentinian music, is a very famous tango from the 30s sung by Carlos Gardel. The song is very important to the movie because it is the song taught by the mother, Carmen's character, to her very beautiful child, Penélope's character, to present during an audition to become a movie star. And when Raimunda sings Volver, it is also very moving because then the mother, Irene, knows that Raimunda remembers her, because she is singing the song that she taught her when she was very young. That was the moment when the mother tried to make her, and one assumes that she was a beautiful child, into a movie star. You know the scene towards the end when the mother says to the daughter, "Have you always had such big bosoms?" and the daughter says, "Yes, since I was a child." So she had been a very attractive child, and the mother had tried to make her even more beautiful for the talent audition. And the mother, without realising it, was creating an irresistible temptation for the father, and he fell into temptation. So Volver is full of meaning.

MD: What about for you, Penélope?

Penélope Cruz: For me it was also a comeback, as you say, in terms of working in my language again after a few years, which I had really missed, and also in terms of working in my country and spending time there. We worked for six months on this movie - we rehearsed for three months and then shot for three. So I felt very blessed to be able to do this in my country, surrounded by my friends and family. But the main comeback, [the thing] that I was really missing, was the feeling of working with him. It had been five years of not working together, and though we stayed in contact because we are very good friends, for me it felt like 20 years, it was too long. I was always comparing everything to working with him, and you shouldn't do that. Once you try it, you get addicted, you're hooked forever. So in every movie that I made, I was always thinking, "What's he going to think of this one?" He's always really present in everything I do.

MD: Did you write the role of Raimunda for Penélope?

PA: She knew the story since the beginning, from the first note that I wrote. But the story always changes a lot during the development. At first I had thought of Penélope for the character of the granddaughter. But during the writing, and even when I had the first draft, I started to think that the granddaughter wasn't important enough - I wanted Penélope to have a bigger part. So I thought she's very young, but biologically she can be a mother and have a 15-year-old daughter. So I rewrote the script five or six times with her in my mind as the mother, Raimunda.

MD: And did you have Carmen Maura in mind for Raimunda's mother?

PA: Usually I don't write the characters with actors in mind. In this case, I wanted to work with Penélope and she was included in the project from the beginning. But for Carmen, the only character that I wrote with specifically her in mind was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. And Antonio [Banderas], the only role I wrote with him in mind was Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! I worked with them a lot of times, but I decided that I would only put faces on characters when I finished the script. However, Carmen entered my mind when I was writing the moment the ghost [of Irene] appears, and it changed everything that I had written before. At the beginning, the movie was more a comedy about this neighbourhood in Madrid. But when I wrote the ghost's first appearance, I thought this was the story that I was looking for. The character of the ghost started to devour all the rest, converting the central theme of the movie into that of the relationship between the mother and her daughter. So the idea of working with Carmen came immediately as I was writing the first draft.

MD: You've mentioned that you rehearsed for three months before shooting - what did that actually involve?

PA: I'm obsessed with the musicality of the dialogues. The first thing I did was take them to a position where I recognised myself. I've realised that my work with actors is more like that of a theatre director rather than a film director. So we begin by reading around a table, and that's how I establish the tone of the dialogues and what's between the lines. Then these readings become rehearsals, but not on location, and during these readings, I adapt the dialogues to the actors and actresses who are taking on those roles. And I also prepare them physically for the role - I usually have a team of people who work with me on this - but I like to be at the forefront of this, of making them [look like] what the character looks like. This is very important for the actors: to be able to look in the mirror and see that this is the character. My image of Penélope in this was of a housewife, very strong, fighting. But at certain times, and this is something Penélope's brought to the role, she also has an almost childlike vulnerability. There's no tradition in Spanish cinema of splendid housewives - normally they're short and fat. So I took as my image the neo-realist housewives of 1950s Italian cinema - Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani, Claudia Cardinale. So it was essential to give Penélope a hairstyle that was backcombed and had height, because she has a very small face.

MD: I think he's forgotten that you're here, Penélope.

PC: No, I'm used to this.

PA: I was very influenced by the makeup of Claudia Cardinale in a film where she had very dark eyeliner. As soon as we hit on that for Penélope, everything changed. It was also very important to have an ample cleavage enhanced by strategically placed medallions, because that's one of the key images of Spanish motherhood, and motherhood is one of the key themes of this film. It was also very important that this woman have an ample arse. The arse is a symbol of optimism. I'm really sorry for those who do not possess a bottom but they can always add something to it. The only false thing that we did was to construct a new arse for her, so that she would have this shape. It wasn't just about the physical thing, it was also about the spirit of the person: Penélope had trained in dance, and so tends to walk upright, very much in the air. But for the character, we wanted someone very grounded, somebody weighed down by life. And an ample arse helps you to be weighed down and be grounded. So rehearsals are part of all this…

The interview continues on http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,1839123,00.html