This film showed the strength of the women from the very beginning. The women are seen taking care of the graves of the men with the winds blowing violently. It's the belief in the village that strong winds can make you crazy.The women live much longer than the men and believe that a person never really dies.
Raimunda ,her sister Sole and daughter Paula visit Raimundas aunt Paula in the village La Mancha. Paula is old and confused and insists that Irene, Raimunda and Soles mother who is supposedly dead has been caring for her. Visions of Irenes ghost had been seen by people in the village, this is accepted as normal.
Raimundas daughter Paula confides that she stabbed her father Paco to death after he attempted to rape her claiming that he was not her father. Raimunda never hesitated she immediately accepted what her daughter told her as fact and went about concealing the crime. She did what she had to do to protect her daughter even telling her daughter remember I killed him. During the process of disposing of the body Raimunda finds out that her aunt Paula had died. Sole attends the funeral alone and returns home to Madrid to find her mothers ghost in the trunk of the car. Accepting that her mothers ghost is there seemed normal to her. Eventually Raimunda meets up with her mothers ghost and realizes that her mother had never really died.
The women in the film were all very strong and capable. Sole supported herself with an illegal beauty salon, Raimunda was able to care for her daughter by running the restaurant without the owners permission. These women were not submissive like most of the films we've viewed.
Each woman lived with their own demons. Raimunda was raped by her father and became pregnant with Paula. She harbored a deep resentment towards Irene for not realizing what was going on and stopping it. Irene finally realizing what had happened to Raimunda and discovering that her husband was having an affair with Augustinas mother set a fire that killed the two.
Realizing that her mother was alive gave the women time to repair their relationship. Irene feeling guilty that she had caused the death of Augustinas mother decided to care for Augustina in her final days of her illness to somehow atone for her sins.
The superstitions would be that the strong winds caused insanity and that the presence of ghosts was common place. I enjoyed the fact that these women did what had to be done in order to survive and were able to maintain loving relationships with each other .
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This is a great post. I too agree that the women showed great strength from the beginning to the end. I was impressed by Raimunda by the way she never questioned her daughter and immediately accepted responsibility for what had happened to Paco. He deserved what he got. Yet Raimunda and her daughter were left to bear that guilt for the rest of their lives. I also wonder if the high rate of insanity was caused by all the awful men who caused the women to lose their minds with their running around with other women causing the women to kill them which would also explain why the men died at an earlier age! I was happy to see Raimunda go to her mother and tell her how much she had missed having her in her life. I think in the era that Irene ignored what was going on between her husband and her daughter there really was no one to go to who would listen or do anything about it. And though she initially pretended it wasn't happening, in the end she did acknowledge what was going on and administered what she thought was the proper punishment.
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