The coupling of legendary Oscar-winning Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and Nobel Prize-winning Canadian short story writer Alice Munro might seem surprising on paper, but not when you get the chance to see Julieta. Both are such sharp examiners of the human condition, particularly of women. Both are brilliant within their chosen venue and both are more interested in characterization than form, but it stops neither from showing their formal expertise. Julieta is such a perfect blend of two different artists, and a wonderfully bittersweet portrait of a woman’s life. Almodóvar’s screenplay weaves together three stories from Munro’s 2004 collection Runaway, which tell the story of a mother in Madrid, whose impromptu meeting with a man on a train leads to a passionate affair, which then leads to heartbreak, betrayal, illness and redemption.
This is the first Almodóvar film I’ve seen since 2006’s Volver. I’ve missed out on his last few films, mostly because he’s always been a filmmaker who can get distracted by his own cheekiness. At his best, he is always one of the movies’ greatest interpreters of human neurosis and sexuality. All About My Mother and Talk to Her are both masterpieces about how perversity is a part of our everyday lives, while Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is one of the most hysterical portrayals of complicated female social dynamics I’ve ever seen. Julieta feels different from his other films I’ve seen. Munro’s modesty rubs off on him. She is such a tender writer, but her stories are often fierce. A lot of her stories deal with the commonplace casualness with which tragedy encounters us, a theme not too out of place for Almodóvar, but its fascinating to see a director as lush and expressive as him adopt such a soft voice. It does Munro and Julieta a great justice.
The titular Julieta is played by two actresses. Emma Suárez plays Julieta in middle age, in her fifties. She lives in Madrid with her boyfriend, Lorenzo (Darío Grandinetti). The two plan to move to Portugal where Lorenzo can get some writing done, but Julieta suddenly changes course when she hears word of her daughter, Antía, who she hasn’t seen in over a decade. Coping with a loss she had only recently gotten over, Julieta sits down to pen her daughter a letter in the hopes of making sense of Antía’s disappearance. We flash back decades before as Julieta (played by Adriana Ugarte) boards a train where she meets Xoan (Daniel Grao), a handsome, soft-spoken fisherman. After a tragedy, the two begin a passionate affair, and Julieta moves into his seaside home, where they live with his maid, Marian (Rossy de Palma), and occasionally visit Xoan’s closest friend, Ava (Inma Cuesta), a sculptor. Eventually, Antía is born, but as more tragedies strike Julieta finds herself constantly having to restart her life, just to stay ahead of her own grief.
The casting throughout Julieta – particularly the several characters that we see in different ages – is a clinic in precision, but no decision is better than the choice of Suárez and Ugarte as the eponymous Julieta. The two actresses form two halves of this woman, a woman disjointed by her love and grief. Ugarte plays a young teacher with a bleach blonde hairdo akin to Til Tuesday-era Aimee Mann. She rides a train where she narrowly avoids a persistent older man who wishes to speak with her and meets Xoan. She teaches the classics and loves reading about Greek mythologies. Suárez’s Julieta is more weathered, pieced back together after falling apart. (The way Almodóvar chooses to transition between the two actresses possesses the kind of cleverness that has made him such a legend to begin with). Julieta’s choice to write her story after hearing word about Antía is a tired framing device, but Almodóvar makes it passionate, and Suárez’s portrayal of maternal obsession is both tender and heartbreaking. The bridge that Ugarte makes to Suárez is probably the film’s strongest asset.
It’s fascinating to me to watch Almodóvar relinquish some of his creative output to another artist, let alone Alice Munro. The generosity with which he tells her stories is compelling and comes across on the screen. This is far from Almodóvar’s best works. It feels more like a successful exercise than a constructed thesis, but its so beautifully told. Julieta lacks a lot of the physicality of his earlier films, the bed-shaking passion that came with Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Bad Education is not as prevalent here. This movie is so quiet, so modest. It speaks to the audacity of the Spanish director that something like Julieta is just about the most surprising thing he could have produced. Of course, the filmmaking is still top notch, equipped with his usual editor (José Salcedo) and a new cinematographer (Jean Claude Larrieu), Julieta pops with the usual flourish of color that we’re used to. More than anything, Julieta feels like a return to form, as Almodóvar re-approaches his calling as one of our best dissectors of humanity.
Written and Directed by Pedro Almodóvar