`VOLVER' STOCKED FULL OF EARTHY, SIMPLE PLEASURES.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

Pedro Almodovar lightens up with his new film, ``Volver.'' It's about ghosts, cancer, murderous jealousy, and there's a corpse stashed in a freezer.

Sounds serious but, compared to the Spanish super-auteur's last three masterpieces ``Bad Education,'' ``Talk to Her'' and ``All About My Mother,'' ``Volver'' is a flat-out romp.

Put together primarily to accentuate Penelope Cruz's luminous screen presence, secondarily to celebrate womanhood in all its forms and finally as an amusing, colorful elegy to the director's village youth, this is arguably Almodovar's most easily enjoyable film since his early wackier ones.

It's also noticeably less substantial in psychological nerve-baring and storytelling ingenuity than his last three films. But no one could be expected to keep a streak that ingenious going forever. And there is much to be said for simple pleasures, which in an Almodovar film are still a good 10 times more complex than in most anybody else's.

The movie opens at a very conscientiously kept cemetery in a windswept La Mancha town. Two sisters who long ago moved to Madrid, unhappily married knockout Raimunda (Cruz) and plain, single hairdresser Sole (Lola Duenas), are there to tie up a few loose family ends, some of which involve the mysterious, fiery death of their parents some years back.

It's a beautiful place of brightly painted facades, craftwork-decorated patios and, of course, impressive grave markers.

The sisters' downscale apartments in the big city are a striking contrast, psychically as well as physically: Raimunda lives in cramped quarters with a no-account husband and her moody pubescent daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo). Before you can say ``Mildred Pierce,'' there's a murder, and Raimunda must cover it up.

But as you may have inferred by now, death is viewed as a positive force in ``Volver'' (the title, like the classic song Cruz lip-syncs in the film, is Spanish for return). Via goofy Almodovaran logic, body-stashing leads Raimunda to an unexpected career as a restaurateur. She not only blossoms with the glow of success, she manages to get most of her neighborhood girlfriends in on the fun, too.

Meanwhile, Sole has somehow brought the ghost of their mother, Irene (Carmen Maura, star of such Almodovar classics as ``Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown'' and ``What Have I Done to Deserve This?''), back to Madrid with her. They feel it's necessary to hide her existence from Raimunda for a while, but Irene's distinctive flatulence makes that a shaky proposition. All of these actresses and more give first-class performances, touching and funny in their turn. But ``Volver'' is really Cruz's coronation as the Spanish Sophia Loren. Earthy, unconquerable, sexy as all get-out yet nobody's sex object, she's also funny and vulnerable in just the right measures. Cruz has never appeared so comfortable in a movie before -- and she's never been given such a variety of moods and actions to play, all of which she nails.

Parts of ``Volver'' seem narratively underimagined (but again, only on the high-curved Almodovar scale). This piece has something to say about forgiveness and defying mortality, and it lets us know that Almodovar has at least experienced some release from the soul-haunting traumas that have informed his recent work.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

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VOLVER - Three stars

(R: language, violence, children in jeopardy, adult situations)

Starring: Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Duenas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo.

Director: Pedro Almodovar.

Running time: 2 hrs.

Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; Royal, West L.A.

In a nutshell: Cruz shines in this lively and somewhat lackadaisical Almodovar ode to female perseverance and bonding. In Spanish with English subtitles.

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Penelope Cruz stars as Raimunda, who must cover up a murder, in Pedro Almodovar's ``Volver.''