POINTS: 5
A loose adaptation from three short stories by Nobel Prize-winner Alice Munro, Julieta, the new film by Pedro Almodóvar, tells the story of Julieta (first played by Adriana Ugarte in the character’s youngster years, then by Emma Suárez in her middle-age golden years) as she undergoes a typical, if subdued, melodrama: first she falls madly in love, then she has a child, and later as times goes by she faces the loss of almost everybody she loves most dearly.
Julieta starts with a chance encounter. The title character is a fifty something woman who’s about to leave her fashionable apartment in Madrid to move to Portugal with her significant other Lorenzo (Argentine actor Darío Grandinetti). But as she’s walking across the city one day, she runs into her friend Beatriz, who tells Julieta that, the week before, she’d accidentally met Julieta’s daughter Antia at Lake Cuomo, a placid leisure spot where Antia was vacationing with her children. Bea says that that Antia knows her mum still is in Madrid, which makes Julieta feel visibly moved. Right away, she decides she won’t move to Portugal at all. What she does is actually quite different: she rents an apartment in the building where she raised Antia. And from then on, she’s determined to find her. Or perhaps Antia will look for her.
Later on, we learn that Julieta hasn’t seen her daughter since Anita turned 18 and fled her home to go to a religious retreat in the mountains, never to come back. Julieta did everything in her power to find her — including hiring a private eye — but to no avail. With a broken heart, she decided it was best to forget her for good — that is, until her chance encounter with Beatriz brought everything back to the present.
On the one hand, Julieta is a true improvement over Almódovar’s previous film, the too flimsy Los amantes pasajeros (“I’m So Excited”), which honestly is not saying much. On the other hand, it’s considerably inferior to the superb La piel que habito (“The Skin I Live In”). For that matter, Julieta is less accomplished than many others of his films — especially his early features.
For starters, for being a melodrama, it’s perhaps too restrained. Though multiple events take place, oddly enough the narrative feels flat and never gripping. It’s as though it lacked even the minimum dramatic drive to keep the story flowing instead of dragging.
Then, it’s not of much help that almost the entire main conflict, with its many detours, is conveyed through self-explanatory dialogue that sounds written rather than spoken. Scene after scene, you have to listen to every single actor explain what’s going on, what went on before, and what will happen next — that’s one of the reasons why Julieta’s voice-over is tedious, the other one being it’s sort of aloof. In the third place, there’s an almost continuous musical score that is meant to add some drama to the story and yet it fails to do so. In fact, it’s quite annoying. Some characters that should be important are barely developed — take Grandinetti’s Lorenzo or Rossy De Palma’s Marian — whereas others lack all possible ambiguity and nuances. On the plus side, Julieta as played by Emma Suárez is an achievement in many regards as this well-known Spanish actress brings some sentiment and a more visceral approach to the drama. Hadn’t it been for her, Julieta would have been hard to sit through.
Almodóvar is a gifted filmmaker who has made many films where he showed a personal mark in both daring genre blending and an appealing set of aesthetics, which you don’t see at all in Julieta. It comes as an unpleasant surprise that it looks like a film made by a beginner with not much luck. Let’s hope Julieta is an occasional misstep.
Production notes
Julieta (Spain, 2016). Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, based on stories by Alice Munro. With Emma Suárez, Adriana Ugarte, Daniel Grao, Inma Cuesta, Dario Grandinetti, Pilar Castro, Rossy de Palma. Cinematography: Jean Claude Larrieu. Editing: Jose Salcedo. Running time: 96 minutes.
@pablsuarez
