There is already a fascinating tension at work in the very concept of Pedro Almodovar, one of modern international cinema’s greatest melodramatists, taking on a story inspired by the coolly incisive, vehemently character-based works of Canadian Nobel Prize-winner Alice Munro. And if the resulting film, “Julieta” feels neither wholly Munro nor typically Almodovar in final execution, there is still a very compelling energy given out by the collision. But there are also areas of paucity, where it feels like even though he’s on perhaps the most contained, restrained, controlled form of his career, the grand machine of Almodovar’s style doesn’t have enough raw material to justify all the effort put into the telling. On one level “Julieta” feels like a work of maturity and empathy and reach, but on another, it feels like a wild beast caged and grinding its teeth on too little meat.
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It’s consummately Almodovarian in look, though, with even the opening credits happening over a shot of scarlet fabric, breathing gently and folded like a Georgia O’Keeffe petal. In short, it looks a little like a vagina, which is appropriate because after his unfocused ensemble picture “I’m So Excited” and Gothic identity horror/critique of male control fantasies “The Skin I Live In,” this is Almodovar plunging back into a very female world. The red is actually a flowing silk dress worn by Julieta (an immensely sympathetic Emma Suarez), seated at a desk and debating what to do with the bright blue envelope she holds in her hands. The envelope goes in the trash (but the red and blue motif will continue across the film whose palette is so premeditated as to feel at times like color-coding) and Julieta goes to greet her lover Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti) with whom she is on the verge of moving to Portugal.
But later, on her way to the store, she bumps into Bea (Michelle Jenner), who tells Julieta that she has seen her daughter Antia recently. The news hits Julieta like a sledgehammer, and she goes home, unpacks all her things, and, in the first of the film’s many abandonments, breaks up with Lorenzo in cruelly unexplained fashion. Suffering what she accurately characterizes as a relapse, like a drug addict, Julieta unpicks the stitches on the new life she’d made for herself since her daughter left without word many years before, rents an apartment in her old building and starts to write, as though in a long letter addressed to Antia, the story of all that had happened. We cut back in time — to what looks like the 80s, judging by the hairstyles and fashions — to Julieta at 25 (Adriana Ugarte), and her first meeting with Xoan (Daniel Groa), who would become Antia’s father.
That meeting takes place on a train, in fateful circumstances that mix sex and death and it’s far from the last time Almodovar tinges his film with such Hitchcockian shades: there’s a full-on Mrs. Danvers in Rossy De Palma‘s devious and disapproving housekeeper Marian, and even Julieta’s shock of yellow hair (completing the primary color triptych) is reminiscent of a Hitchcock blonde. But teasing such markers throughout the story only serves to set up expectations that the film cannot necessarily fulfill.
Because this is not a murder mystery, in even the most metaphorical sense. And the delicious twists and flourishes that Hitchcock (and Patricia Highsmith, who is even name-checked by one of the characters) perfected are robbed of some of their intrigue when the revelations they lead to feel neither particularly dramatic, nor especially revelatory. If the mystery of “Julieta” is why Antia left when she did, it is not a mystery that can be solved with reference to anything but Antia’s own character and state of mind, neither of which we know too much about, so that ultimately it all resolves in rather simplistic fashion. It walks and talks like a whodunnit, but “Julieta” is really a whydunnit, one in which the psychological profiling is a little too cursory to deliver the requisite surprises.
But there is so much knotty pleasure to be had from the sheer, unmistakable verve of Almodovar’s style even if, perhaps in response to the failure of rare all-out misfire “I’m So Excited” he has clamped down on any hint of splashy excess to turn in what is for him, a relatively somber drama. Certain trademarks slip out — he has a fetishist’s eye for creating connections and allusions through costume and styling and props, like young Julieta’s hair and heavy make-up, or a Klimt-patterned dressing gown that older Julieta wears, or a priapic little sculpture of a seated man made by her artist friend Ava (Inma Cuesta). There is even a fabulous overhead cooking shot (this time an omelette) which may be as close to a Hitchcock cameo as we get in Almodovar movies.
The real thrust of the film, however, is sorrow, not suspense, a fact perhaps best demonstrated by Alberto Iglesias‘ standout score. It’s a story not only of abandonment and absence, but also of the tragedy of usurpation, and especially of women occupying roles and homes and beds that were previously another woman’s domain. Julieta herself usurps the place of Xoan’s comatose, then deceased wife. Her father replaces her ailing mother with the woman who comes to tend house. The resentful, long-serving Marian reluctantly retires, and a new housekeeper is engaged the very same day; with adult female roles and relationships so apparently fickle and easily replicated with a different model, the only absence that cannot be filled is that of a lost child. There is something profoundly moving in that observation and as embodied in Suarez’s tightly coiled performance, it gives “Julieta” its moments of realness, of rawness. And those moments prove that with the wick turned down on his Almodovarian fire, the great Spanish director may get fewer sparks flying, but the embers still glow and can occasionally burn. [B]
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