Julieta, film review: Astonishingly rich and bold

Pedro Almodóvar explores his favourite themes of love, loss and the female psyche in this spectacular return to form, says David Sexton
David Sexton26 August 2016

Pedro Almodóvar’s last film, I’m So Excited! was a preposterously camp farce set on a flight and a complete tonal disaster. Julieta is an entirely different, you might almost say opposite, proposition: grave, literary, richly textured, retrospective and episodic, spanning lives.

Some viewers who treasure Almodóvar’s substantial back catalogue (some 20 films now) have found its comparative reserve to be slightly disappointing, a toned down, de-energised version of his flamboyance. Taken on its own merits, though, Julieta is extremely moving, all the more rewarding on a second viewing.

Julieta is based on three linked short stories, Chance, Soon and Silence, by the great, Nobel-winning Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, from her 2004 collection Runaway. They present different stages of the life of Juliet: first as a 21-year-old classics teacher in Vancouver who meets by chance a fisherman called Eric on a train and six months later goes to see him in his remote west coast home, discovers he is newly widowed, and becomes his partner; then, a few years later, in Soon, Juliet takes their baby daughter, Penelope, across country to see her distant, retired parents near Toronto; finally, in Silence, Juliet, widowed herself since Eric drowned in a storm when Penelope was just 13, goes to pick up her daughter, now 20, from a six-month retreat at an island “Spiritual Balance Centre”, only to find that Penelope has disappeared, choosing, “for her spirituality and her growth”, to cut off all future contact with her.

Years later Juliet is still waiting, still hoping to hear from her daughter again. “She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort,” the story ends, severely.

In his initial adaptation of these narratives, planning his first English language film, Almodóvar moved the setting to New York but even so, writing in Spanish, he found himself “scared to change language, culture and geography” and didn’t pursue the project. It was only when he moved the setting to Spain that the story flowed, necessarily moving further away from Munro’s original, he says. “If it’s difficult to translate the Canadian writer’s style to a discipline as opposed to literature as cinema is, making it into a Spanish story is an impossible task,” he comments, asking that his film should be taken as a tribute to Munro, rather than an adaptation.

Sex and death: Adriana Ugarte as the young Julieta

Actually, it is remarkably faithful to the original, skilfully weaving the three discrete stories into one, filling in Munro’s lacunae. We first see Julieta in the present, in her mid-fifties, now, packing up her stylish, minimalist flat in Madrid, to move to Portugal with her new partner, tall, gentle writer Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti) who knows nothing of her missing daughter, Antia, so completely has Julieta erased her from her life.

In this incarnation, Julieta is excellently portrayed by Emma Suarez; in the scenes when she is younger, she’s played equally well but quite differently by another actress, Adriana Ugarte. Almodóvar says he’s not in favour of the same actress playing all the ages of the same characters. Nor is anybody who has seen such horrors of prosthetics as Leonardo Di Caprio playing J Edgar Hoover all the way up to 77. There are risks in the multiple actor strategy too but here the gamble has paid off, crucially for a film that is so much about continuities and broken connections in the passing of time. Adriana Ugarte has the confidence, optimism and immediate sensuality of youth; Emma Suarez is a woman whose losses and disappointments have been so deeply internalised that they have affected her whole physical being.

In the street, the older Julieta bumps into Bea, the former teenage best friend of the daughter she has heard nothing from for 12 years. Bea tells her she saw Antia recently at Lake Como, thin, still beautiful and with three children of her own. Shocked, Julieta decides not only to stay in Madrid but to return to the apartment building where she and her daughter once lived, haunting the streets of the area, reviving the memories she has suppressed. She also begins to write a notebook about Antia, perhaps for her one day even, she hopes, addressing her in her absence, telling her everything she couldn’t tell her when she was a child — and so the film launches back into the past.

It is astonishingly rich and bold in its staging, in such a distinctively Spanish way, so direct in its tragedy

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She was 25. She was travelling on a train one stormy night (here reading a book on Greek Tragedy, whereas in the Munro it’s more slyly The Greeks and the Irrational). An unappealing older man tries to strike up a conversation and she changes carriage, meeting the much more fetching fisherman Xoan (Daniel Grao) in the buffet car. After the next stop, the train brakes suddenly. The older man has committed suicide on the line. Xoan tells Julieta it is not her fault and they make love, as the train moves on through the night. Strangers on a train: sex and death.

A few months later, Julieta receives a letter from Xoan, haphazardly addressed to the school where she teaches. She takes it as an invitation to go to him in his Galician fishing village, where she arrives on the very day of his invalid wife’s funeral and is scornfully received by his fearsome housekeeper, Marian, full of cynical savvy (Almodóvar regular Rossy de Palma in a fright-wig). But when Xoan returns home, despite Marian’s warnings that he has another girlfriend, local artist Ava (Inma Cuesta), he and Julieta immediately make love. And she is already bearing his child.

Antia (played by successive actresses too, Ariadna Matin, Priscilla Delgado and Blanca Pares) grows up loving the fishing way of life, as a schoolgirl reluctant to leave even for summer camp. But while she is away, Julieta and Xoan row over Ava, although she is by now Julieta’s friend too. Not such a terrible row: Julieta goes off for a walk, Xoan goes out fishing. But the sea turns stormy…

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It seems that Antia has the strength to help her mother through their shared loss, moving to Madrid, making themselves a new life. But then at 18 she sets off for a three-month spiritual retreat in the Pyrenees and, as she goes, in her final look, Julieta, always troubled by partings, sees flashbacks to the old man on the train and Xoan as she set off on her walk that day…

Compared to other Almodóvar films, Julieta may be austere, concentrated on its tragic story, with few allusions, jokes or diversions, with only one song, over the end credits (“Don’t leave, I don’t want you to leave…”). Here there’s nothing camp, kitsch or pop, no relishing of outrage, no melodrama. But it remains astonishingly rich and bold in its staging, in such a distinctively Spanish way, so physical, so strongly coloured and clearly stated, so intense, so direct in its tragedy.

Perhaps it can be accommodated to his famously female-centric worldview? Women forged his character, he has said, and he celebrates their resilience: “I never identified with the male figure: maternity inspires me more than paternity.” But here that vision has been wholly melded with that of Alice Munro, a great writer about loss, dislocation and the harm we cause as well as suffer. Spectacular.

Cert 15, 99 mins

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