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Spain 2016
Directed by
Pedro Almodovar
99 minutes
Rated MA

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3.5 stars

Julieta

Synopsis  A brokenhearted woman decides to confront the unexplained disappearance of her daughter.

It’s been a while since Pedro Almodóvar’s last film, I’m So Excited!, a lightweight if likeable airline comedy.  Julieta is a return to his more seriously probing work around the late ‘90s with films such as All About My Mother –  beautifully-composed Sirkian melodramas about middle-class people and their emotional wounds.

Based on three inter-related short stories by Alice Munro from her 2004 compendium, "Runaway: Chance, Soon and Silence", Julieta is the story of a mother reaching out in her imagination to her only daughter who disappeared into some kind of cultish group twelve years earlier.  We witness Julieta’s story in flashback as she writes it down for the girl after her supressed memories of her are revived by a chance meeting with her daughter’s childhood friend.

Played in her younger years by Adriana Uguarte and in the film’s present by Emma Suárez, Julieta is a classic Almodóvar heroine, a middle-aged woman and mother, thoughtful, articulate and sensual, concealing a profound pain beneath her stylish exterior.  The director opens the film brilliantly with a vulva-like image that when the camera pulls out is revealed to be a close-up of the folds of Julieta’s red silken dress. From there Almodóvar makes winning use of his readily recognizable retro art and costume design his visual stylings enhanced by Alberto Iglesias's score and often being framed using shallow depth of field and striking configurations of characters against minimalist backgrounds to create a seductively gorgeous surface for this story of grief and loss as Julieta recalls her former life with Antía’s father, Xoan (Daniel Grao), her friendship with Xoan’s sometime lover, Ava (Inma Cuesta), and her relationship with Xoan’s protectively disapproving housekeeper ,Marian (played by Rossy de Palma whom many will recall from the director’s 1988 break-out hit, Women On The Edge Of  A Nervous Breakdown).

Although the device of two actresses playing a single character is not ideal both Uguarte and Suárez, the former youthfully vigorous and exceptionally beautiful, the latter more melancholy and faded in looks give fine, understated  performances. Almodóvar leaves Antía, played as an 18-year-old by Blanca Parés, as a largely absent figure, a strategy that  telling harmonizes with Julieta’s sense of loss. Some may question the film’s ending but in it's way it also works well.  Whatever their ups and downs, mother-daughter relationships never end. Only films do.

Julieta breaks no new ground for Almodóvar but it is a polished example of what he does best.

 

 

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