For his latest movie …….his 20th …..Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar has done a 360 degree turn from his last film the outrageously camp farce ‘I’m So Excited‘ and eschewed comedy completely to make one of his excellent signature female-centric melodramas.
Julieta is loosely based on three short stories from the Canadian Pulitizer-Prize writer Janet Munro and is the tale of a middle-aged woman who decides to confront her life about which she had been in denial about, and finally be able to deal with the events leading up to her only daughter choosing to abandon her. Almodovar chooses to start tell the story with present day Julieta (Emma Suárez) as she is about to leave Madrid to start a new chapter in her life in Portugal with her writer/partner Lorenzo (Darío Grandinetti). However in the street she bumps into Bea (Michelle Jenner) who had been her daughter Antía’s best friend when they were both teenagers, and when she shares that she had recently seen her and that she is the happy mother of three children, Julieta immediately decides to ditch Lorenzo and their plans and stay in Madrid just in case.
Now ensconced in an apartment in the same building where she and Antía (Blanca Parés) used to live, a distraught Julieta starts a journal in which she writes down a record of her life to date ostensibly in the form of a letter to her absent daughter, but it also conveniently serves as the narrative for the movie. Starting with Julieta as a very young Substitute Classics Teacher (now played by a spiky haired Adriana Ugarte) who is thrown together with a handsome fisherman Xoan (Daniel Grao) on a traumatic train journey, which ends up them with making out.
Fast forward a few months later and as she is about to finish her temporary teaching assignment, Julieta gets a note out of the blue from Xoan reminiscing about their night of passion, which she interprets as invitation to go visit him in his home overlooking the scene. In true Almodovar fashion she arrives the day after the funeral of Xoan’s wife who had been in a coma for five years, and is met by the very frosty housekeeper Marian (Almodovar regular Rossy de Palma) who is happy to part with the fact that Xoan is staying the night with his mistress Ana (Inma Cuesta).
Nevertheless Julieta stays and Xoan comes back and they start off from where had they last finished, and very soon after the birth of Antía, they start to play happy families. It is all gong swimmingly well for some years until Antía is a teenager, and then a restless Julieta wants to go back to teaching, and she fires Marian and even confronts Xoan about his on/off relationship, and in a fit of pique he goes out fishing even though there is a major storm brewing.
When tragedy follows, a distraught Julieta allows Antía, now a forceful teenager besotted with her very close friend Bea, to move them both to Madrid and start a new life. Everything very slowly fits into place and eventually after Julieta shakes off her grief-induced depression, she finds a new kind of happiness. That however is all shattered when college-age Antía goes off for a three month retreat, from which she totally disappears from the face of the earth, and cuts off all contact with Julieta.
Almodovar keeps us in suspense for most of this multi-layered story feeding facts to Julieta (and us) piecemeal and although this movie may not be quite as superb as some of his masterpieces such as Talk To Her and All About My Mother, or as overly dramatic, but it is nevertheless an absorbing compelling melodrama that will be welcomed with open arms by his legions of faithful fans. It is also so great seeing him back in a genre that he excels at with such style and completely like no other filmmaker.
Usually known for casting his lead actors from a coterie of regulars, this time Almodovar breaks with his tradition and selected Ugarte and Suárez to respectively play the young and new Julieta, and although they both added totally different nuances to their really superb performances, it made such sense to split the role in this way.
