European cinema at its best.
Julieta
Grade: A
Director: Pedro Almodovar (Talk to Her)
Screenplay: Almodovar, from stories by Alice Munro
Cast: Emma Suarez, Adriana Ugarte
Rating: R
Runtime: 139 min
by John DeSando
Adapt delicate writer Alice Munro’s three short stories, take her heroine Juliet, and mix with hyperbolic writer-director Pedro Almodovar channeling Alfred Hitchcock, and you have one heck of a romantic thriller, Julieta. I realize the Spanish setting, not Munro’s Canada, turns the screw of lyricism very tight, but it is after all as flamboyant, colorful (full of metaphoric reds) and, female-loving as any other of his films.
As we come to know our reasonably-reliable narrator, Julieta (Emma Suarez), we discover a mature but lonely woman whose pain will be incrementally exposed to us but not too soon. She breaks the linear underpinnings of the story to take us by flashback to her younger self (Adriana Ugarte) and the birth of her eventually-estranged daughter, Antia (Priscilla Delgado, adolescent and Blanca Peres, 18 years old).
Almodovar is not in a rush to reveal the toll on Julieta for her daughter’s absence, and that is the beauty of this romantic drama, where her pain, loss, and guilt form a seamless portrait of a woman on a journey to self discovery. Like Odysseus (The Odyssey is alluded to in one of her young teacher sequences), only after serious confrontation with her selfishness and self-centered libido does she see the central role she plays in the seemingly random vicissitudes of life.
The sea plays a figurative part as it did for Homer: so much of the story relies on its lyrical presence as well as its danger (like women): “The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.” Matthew Arnold.
While women do the heavy emotional lifting and seem to hold the plot strings, as typical of Almodovar, men are actually prominent players, from a suicidal train passenger across the seat from her and a manly fisherman, Xoan (Daniel Grao) in the dining car to a splendidly-attentive writer, Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti—reminding me of Frank Langella). Without them only the loss of her daughter would not a complete drama make.
A statue of a male with a powerful penis plays a part in the proceedings, suggesting the integral part sexuality plays in lives. The lesbian leitmotif is a reminder that not all sex is heterosexual nor is it without consequences, as we’re reminded that existentially everyone gets what he deserves.
In the end, it’s women Almodovar pursues and loves with splashes of red in cars, clothes, and cakes to show female passion and his poetry. As in the current thriller Elle, these European directors can tell a whopper of a story starring women of a certain age hotter than about any young thing you can think of.
The blonde in trouble and the Bernard-Hermann-like score, coupled with the puzzle-like story, may recall Hitchcock, but what we do know from both directors is never to take the vulnerable ladies for granted and always savor their depth of feeling in lives painful but eminently worth living.
Almodovar is a director with an artist’s eye and an unbounded affection for women Hitchcock would envy. See this film to experience just what European directors can achieve without cheap sex, gratuitous violence, or distracting special effects.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
