Julieta review | A film by Pedro Almodóvar

Julieta, from lately hit-or-miss Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar, comes with a curious amount of restraint from the normally flamboyant filmmaker, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t idiosyncratic in many ways. The relative subtlety and moodiness of Julieta suits him well, and while it’s doubtful that he’ll continue this track of earnestness and sincerity for longer than a single film, Almodóvar at least proves to his growing number of detractors that he’s still capable of learning new tricks.

Loosely translated from three Alice Munro short stories that have been transplanted from Canada to Europe, Julieta tells the time shifting story of a hurting mother and widow (Emma Suárez, playing Julieta as an older adult) who has been lost at sea mentally since the death of her husband (Daniel Grao) and the long ago estrangement of her daughter, Antía (played by Priscilla Delgado and Blanca Parés at different ages). Just as Julieta is about to move on from any hope that her daughter will return to her, an old friend of Antía’s says that she’s living in Lake Como and now has three children. The very mention of such information is enough to send Julieta spiraling into grief all over again, causing her to drop everything in the scant hope she could see her daughter again. She starts writing letters to her daughter not only as a stylistic gambit to show the viewer what happened in the past, but to say all the things she couldn’t say to Antía before.

In terms of overall faithfulness to Munro, Julieta bears little resemblance beyond passing glances, but in terms of conveying the same sense of anguish many Munro characters go through, Almodóvar’s instincts are spot on. Emotionally speaking, Julieta is poignantly indebted to the source material, and it’s a minor marvel that works as well as it does because when it comes to sincerity and anything remotely downbeat, Almodóvar tends to struggle. He’s a filmmaker that’s often at his best when things can be blown out of proportion to grand degrees. He rarely trades in something that requires the long term, internalized reflections that his characters have to make. At his best, his films are fun, vibrant, and uplifting. At his worst, his films are off the wall camp experiences that mistake personal fetishization for irreverence.

Not that Almodóvar isn’t employing a lot of his trademark stylistic touches here, it’s just that here he finds novel ways of integrating them. It’s still a vibrant and colourful film, but his focus on the performance and script is a refreshing change of pace for someone well known for focusing vacillating too intensely on the background or amping up the foreground to annoying degrees. Also, in a bid to directly reference Hitchcock by way of the material’s talk of repression and stalking (which Julieta definitely engages in when she flees her once stable life), Almodóvar utilizes Alberto Ignlesias’ Bernard Hermann-esque musical score to expert effect. There’s always unease and sadness to Julieta that persists throughout, but Almodóvar always wants the viewer to think that a solution to all of the character’s problems is just around the corner. Is that manipulative? Certainly, but it’s also effective here.

Much of the credit should go to the cast, as well. Suárez and Adriana Ugarte, who portrays younger Julieta, have created the fully fleshed out character that the film rises and falls on. It’s like watching two great performers working perfectly in tandem with neither of them ever meeting on screen. The familial dynamics of the story allow for great chemistry among the cast members, but the film gets stolen by a subtly malicious Rossy de Palma the housekeeper for Julieta’s first husband who’s determined to tear the happy family apart bit by bit. This character isn’t the main focus of the piece, thankfully, so it’s nice to see that Almodóvar has found a way here to include some camp value (in a Joan Collins sense of the term) without overpowering some really delicate work being done by the rest of the cast.

Although smiles, scowls, and overall weirdness are what Almodóvar tends to gravitate towards the most, the taciturn frown that he generally exhibits with this, his 20^th feature, is quite becoming. It’s his most moving film in a decade, tonally closest to Volver and his best on the whole since All About My Mother. Some might herald Julieta as a sort of “return to form” for Almodóvar, but I doubt this dalliance back towards the kinds of elevated melodramas he used to make is here to stay. For now, though, I will take what I can get and see what the future holds. Hopefully there will be more of this, a little less of The Skin I Live In, and a lot less of whatever I’m So Excited was.

Julieta opens at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto on Friday, December 23. It opens on January 6 in Vancouver, January 13 in Ottawa, and on January 27 in Montreal, Halifax, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Victoria.

Check out the trailer for Julieta: