...Mulva???

I am so fucking confused. I've heard so much about Volver, about how good the cast is, about how it has a lot of Oscar potential and about how it's the most successful Spanish movie ever made.
And there's been a sort of trailer-drought lately (by the way, I realise that new trailers for Casino Royale, Flags of Our Fathers, Blood Diamond and The Prestige were released this week, but for reasons I won't go into, I haven't seen them), so I thought "What the hey.", I'll see what this mysterious Volver is all about.

Well, I've watched the trailer four times now. And I went into a lot of synopsis research. And now I have even less knowledge of what this film is about than before I knew anything about it!

From the trailer, here is what I thought the movie was about:
A family of women get together for a suprise reunion, only to find the mother cutting all her hair off to con a talk-show into thinking she had cancer. To make matters worse, Penelope Cruz somehow kills the mother, drags her over to a freezer, dumps her in it, throws it into a pit and buries it.
Then Penelope and Co. go about their daily lives trying to forget about killing their own mother.

And yeah, I know, it sounds terrible.

But then, I went to IMDb to find out how close I was. Well, you decide, this is IMDb's synopsis:
After her death, a mother returns to her home town in order to fix the situations she couldn't resolve during her life. Of her family left in the town, her ghost slowly becomes a comfort to her daughters, as well as her grandchild.

So, basically, the trailer shows us Penelope Cruz killing someone, disposing of their corpse and someone pretending to have cancer to reap the benefits of sympathy, but the overall movie is about a ghost returning to put some unfinished business to rest and make her daughters feel super? I don't understand. I just don't get it. Where does bloodshed fit into that? Maybe its the mother that was killed by Penelope Cruz. But then, why would her ghost return to make her feel good? What is going on here?

The movie got standing ovations at Cannes, so it can't be a lost dog of a film, even though that's what it appears to be. It's apparently really great, but it's impossible to tell from the trailer. Whatever the marketing, I'm sure once I get to see it, all the jagged pieces of the Volver jigsaw will come together.

Even though, admit it: My version of Volver > IMDb's version of Volver.

Volver - Sony Pictures Classic
Anticipation Level: Low.
Look out for: Penelope Cruz. She's a great looking gal with some real prescence. She's really developed I think...... as an actress, I mean.
US Release date: 3rd November, 2006.
Trailer Source