Julieta

You may enjoy Julieta (2016) more if you know that it is a women's film from the melodrama genre and a story of pure emotion. While it is labelled a romance it is nothing like a romance and don't expect light entertainment or laughs as the film is devoid of humour. What is does have is an outpouring of quintessentially maternal guilt and self-absorbed loss that is palpable throughout the film. While critics may be divided, this is a beautiful film with a long aftertaste.

We meet the attractive widow Julieta just as she is packing to leave Madrid and move with her boyfriend to Portugal. Madrid is full of painful memories, the most intense of which is not seeing her daughter Antia for twelve years. A chance encounter with her daughter's former best friend opens an uncontrollable torrent of guilt which suddenly fills Julieta's life. Abandoning her boyfriend, she decides to stay in Madrid in case Antia ever looks for her. Unable to deal with her grief in any other way, she writes the story of her life as if she is talking to her absent daughter.

Julieta narrates the story in chapters that become extended flashbacks to her early romance with Antia's father, their lives together as a family and its eventual disintegration. What was once a life full of loving relationships becomes one of multiple losses even though Julieta herself bears little blame for the tragedies. Julieta is unaware how deeply her daughter was affected by what happened and is bewildered when Antia searches for spirituality at a Swiss retreat. Her sudden disappearance without explanation has left her mother with unresolved grief.

As each chapter unfolds we see the larger portrait of the mother and daughter relationship in all its dense complexity and destructive power. The narrative teasingly denies us knowledge of why Antia refuses all contact with her mother, and year after year Julieta mourns each passing birthday as if it was a funeral. The storytelling intensity is sustained by finely nuanced acting from the two stars who play the younger and older Julieta, and those who play Antia at different ages. The camera-work has a melancholic sensitivity that resonates with the Spanish landscapes and urban settings, and while the story unwinds slowly, to tell it more quickly would lose depth and meaning. Julieta is a darkly sensitive essay about the universal emotion of maternal guilt and its melancholy lifts like a rising fog with a masterfully ambivalent ending that soars.

It's usually worth watching an Almodovar movie if only for the exquisite use he makes of the camera and the quality of acting he manages to extract from his cast. That is certainly the case with Julieta in which every scene is beautifully composed. Andalusia, Galicia and Madrid have never looked so enticing. Having said that, the narrative of this movie is really poor. It revolves in some sense around the theme of guilt but that doesn't stand up well to a close examination. The twist at the close is pure melodrama and the film doesn't really end at all. Almodovar just brings down the shutters on the movie. So this is very much a mixed bag. Lovely filming, lovely actors, lovely decor, but dare I say it, this is basically an art-house soap.

My interest in Almodovar is rather muted. He doesn't excel in any of the ways of presenting the world that really matter to me but he does several things more than well, so every so often I visit. There is the desire to submerge ourselves in fiction, lose ourselves to self in order to wake to a fabric that extends from self. That's Talk to Her for me.

But like Woody Allen or the Coens, he has consistently worked for so long on the same motifs that coming to him is also a matter of is he particularly inspired that day. I'm pleased to say he is.

In the individual pieces of cinematic craft, this is not particularly exceptional. If you're heavily inclined to how story resolves drama, you will see here something that simply trails off near the end. The symbolic motifs greet us upfront; a deer in slow-motion, tumultuous sea out the window. His bright reds on walls and the like are not something I can get excited about, in this or any film.

But he is inspired today on the fundamental matter of self passing through self. He manages to do this with just a few strands of narrative. There is the young woman who was on her way to all life ahead of her that night on the train, who finds herself yanked by unexpected passion. There is the house of passion in the small fishing village, eerily explored with Hitchcock hues. And there is bewildering loss as she wanders away a widowed mother.

Above all I love here the sense of transition. Almodovar does so well - his actress helps - in spinning narrative to explore tragedy. He says enough about the jittery urge for adventure as a story we throw ourselves in so that we can infer more fleeting illusion around the crushing melodrama about life breaking down. She's not just this grieving woman that another film, say, in the realist format would have simply followed around Madrid; we're privy to all this richness of her young self having set off in search. Things couldn't have only worked this way for her, it's important to see; but sometimes they do, sometimes setting out for open sea means finding yourself marooned on an island, nothing right or wrong.

And Almodovar is ineluctably Spanish, meaning Catholic; so communion with the fleeting, transcendent stuff must take place firmly within ritual, in his case (just like Ruiz before) fiction. The whole is narrated by an author writing the story down as she waits in her apartment, shifting us forward and back. It speaks about the imaginative mind being burdened by the narratives of memory. For Almodovar, there is merit in the effort. Had she not stayed behind to write, she would have missed the letter. Even more pertinently for me, there is a bedridden mother (a mirrored woman) who is allowed to languish in her room, written off as an invalid. But when her daughter comes to visit, the recognition nourishes her back to her feet.

I'm a big fan of Almodóvar's work, his movies follow my life since I was a teenager, I always adore his early work, movies like "Kika", "High heels" and "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" are still considered by me as the height of his career - a bizarre comedy- dramas with a kinky side and raw edges.

in the late 90's Almodóvar became famous worldwide with movies such as "live flesh" "all about your mother" and "talk to her" a melodramatic movies that touched us with a unique approach and vivid colors.

this movie is similar to his big successful movies from the late 90s: the women are in the center of the story where the men pushed aside, there is still a melodramatic approach and lots of mysteries that similar to an onion, piled up slowly, layer by layer until the very end of the movie. the colors are vivid like most of his movies, especially the red color, a sign of passion for Almodóvar, just like his Characters who drive themselves by their total passion to life and love.

so, is that movie good? if you want to compare it to his best and famous work - "all about your mother" and "talk to her" then this movie will lose the fight, it's less sophisticated and the plot has less twists, but still it's a good movie with a touching plot, good acting and a great director who hasn't lost his touch.

Not Almodovar's best film, but also far from his weakest. This character study/mystery/melodrama has hints of both Douglas Sirk and even Hitchcock in its beautiful look, production design, and score, even if it's story is more wispy than most films by those old masters.

Julieta is a classy, attractive middle-aged woman, living seemingly happily with a successful writer, when she encounters an old friend of her daughter's. The friend tells Julieta of running into the girl while traveling – not knowing the daughter disappeared many years ago, a loss that left Julieta emotionally destroyed.

Julieta abruptly decides to break up with her current man, and live alone to try and deal with the re-awakened grief she had finally managed to tamp down. She writes the story of her adult life and loves – which led to her loss – as a sort of goodbye (perhaps suicide?) letter/diary to her daughter that she knows will probably never be read.

The story is always interesting, and the performances are generally quite strong (with one glaring exception in Rossy De Palma's over the top villain-y maid, who seems like she's stepped out one of Almodovar's far less subtle, more campy stories). But while the characters are going through tempests of great emotion, the film kept me cool, removed and observational. That's no crime, but it did keep it from being a powerful experience -- it ended up being an 'interesting and stylish' one instead. Almodovar has said he intended the film to be seen twice, so one can re-see the scenes understanding the film's later revelations, and as admire his work I'm willing to give it that chance and see if that deepens the experience.