Julieta – Film Review

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Starring Adriana Ugarte, Emma Suárez, Daniel Grao, Rossy De Palma

Review by David Turpin

Touted as an excursion into “pure drama” – as distinct from melodrama – Almodóvar’s latest is a velvety-smooth adaptation  of three stories by Canadian writer Alice Munro, relocated to Spain – or, at least, to the distinctive Spain of the director’s singular filmography.

Julieta emerges after a bumpy period for Almodóvar.  After Broken Embraces (2009) deposited him at the height of prestige-cinema dullness, his subsequent films The Skin I Live In (2011) and I’m So Excited (2013) forked off at disparate angles – the former an adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s terrifically ghoulish novel Tarantula that somehow reduced it to a soap opera; the latter an antic farce whose satire of contemporary Spanish politics drew shrugs abroad.  Julieta, then, is a regrouping of sorts – with its themes of maternal estrangement, atonement, and regeneration appearing closest, at least on a superficial level, to the justly beloved All About My Mother (1999).

The title character is here played by two actresses – with the striking Adriana Ugarte playing her younger self, while former Julio Medem muse Emma Suárez plays her in middle age.  The device isn’t dissimilar to Lars Von Trier’s use of Stacey Martin and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Nymphomaniac – and the underlying idea is the same, with the aging of the female face and figure read as a poetic signifier of the harshness of life, rather than a mere consequence of the passage of time.

The engine of Almodóvar’s plot is Julieta’s separation from her daughter, but the screenplay is structured in such a way as to withhold the nature of this separation until a very late stage – a decision that is presumably intended to recast it as a character study, rather than a straightforward mystery.  The choice is a strange one, given the nature of Almodóvar’s very distinct style.  As a director, he continues to favour glamorous surface-level performances, in a grand Old-Hollywood style – a preference that risks dipping into daytime television posturing if the stars are anything less than magnetic.  Fortunately, both Ugarte and Suárez rise to the task – although supporting turns from Daniel Grao (as the fisherman with whom Julieta falls in love) and Inma Cuesta (as her artist friend and erstwhile love rival) are fairly thin.  Thankfully, the incomparable Rossy De Palma – a veteran of old, fun Almodóvar – is on hand as the sinister housekeeper whose machinations begin to unravel Julieta’s fragile family.

It’s difficult to know what the ever-capricious Almodóvar means by “pure drama” since, to any other eye, Julieta comes on as sheer melodrama – complete with shipwrecks, wild coincidences, and a Mrs. Danvers-type glaring through rain-swept windows.  Strictly speaking, melodrama involves heightened emotional states that are determined by plot rather than the interior lives of the characters, and this certainly seems to be the case for Julieta, whose predicament appears to be her consistent positioning, by accident or design, as somebody to whom things happen, rather than somebody who determines the course of her own life.  This is par for the course with Almodóvar, but his relative restraint in terms of the actual events of the story – a consequence, perhaps, of his unexpected source material – means there is more dead space in Julieta than one might necessarily associate with his cinema.

This doesn’t make for “pure drama”, but it’s not necessarily a weakness either – as it gives us plenty of time to admire the ravishing smoothness of the filmmaking.  This is to be expected from latter-day Almodóvar, but Julieta surely has some of the most gorgeous sequences of his entire career – most of all a train journey that encompasses both sex and death, setting the actions of the human characters into sharp relief against the flight of a stag that runs parallel to the vehicle.  Less operatic, but equally affecting, is a masterfully orchestrated cut in which the removal of a towel cues the transition from Julieta’s youth to her middle-age.  It is, of course, pure Almodóvar for the maturation of a heroine to be mapped so explicitly onto her hairdressing experiences, and this – to a certain extent – is the quandary of Julieta as a whole.  One senses Almodóvar wanting to do something different, but as much as Julieta presents as a change of approach, his mastery of form and thrilling taste for melodrama remain as present as his tendency to approach actresses as dolls and his latter-day propensity toward glibness.  For better and worse, he remains purely himself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH5_4osOZK8