Julieta - a welcome return to form from one of the masters of cinema

Emma Suarez as the older Julieta

Pedro Almodovar’s recent output has been, to be kind, a little patchy. The consolation is that even a sub-par Almodovar is more interesting than a lot of directors’ best joined-up film making. But when the Spanish maestro hits top form, as he does with Julieta, the results are spectacular.

This is without doubt one of the films of the year. And, like a cinematic version of the first cuckoo of spring, hopefully marks the end of a lacklustre summer and heralds a much more interesting, on paper at least, autumn.

Julieta is a rich and layered story of love and loss, of grief and guilt, and of the fundamental triumph of hope. It is an intelligent and thoughtful film which is not afraid to take its time, or to provide you with moments to simply appreciate the characters and their situation. Undercut with this however is a sense of foreboding, brilliantly manifest through the music of Alberto Iglesias.

We meet Julieta first as a woman in her middle years, played by Emma Suarez, preparing to leave Madrid for a new life in Portugal with her lover. A chance encounter with a young woman on the street changes her plans and her life. The young woman is a friend of Julieta’s daughter Antia, who has been missing for twelve years; she reveals that she met Antia recently on holiday.

The shock discovery prompts Julieta to change her plans and confront her life. As she sits down to compose a long letter to her missing daughter the film moves into flashback with Adriana Ugarte taking over as the younger Julieta.

As she tells her story we realise that this is a woman whose every opportunity for happiness has been compromised by circumstance. Her story starts with meeting Antia’s father on a train; he is one of two men she meets on that journey and her encounters with these men defines her entire life from that point. Every meeting, every relationship is shaded with loss and sadness from here on.

Given that we are told that Antia is missing we are inclined to see this film as a mystery. Almodovar encourages us to do this with overtones of Hitchcock; the structure and that soundtrack call to mind echoes of Vertigo, another missing person classic. There are shades of Rebecca too and Almodovar also has one of the characters refer to himself as being like an obsessive out of a Patricia Highsmith novel.

But fundamentally the mystery here is Julieta. What happened to turn the vibrant young woman into the haunted heroine of her later years? The transformation between the two characters incidentally is a stunning coup de cinema and a welcome piece of simple invention after months of emotionless CGI.

Almodovar directs the film superbly. He wrote the script himself from three Alice Munro short stories which are seamlessly joined here. Narratively the film works wonderfully; there is one final surprising plot twist which should really have been revealed earlier but it is just about forgivable under the circumstances.

His gift for creating mood is undiminished. Few directors use setting and production design to illustrate a character’s internal life as well as Almodovar does. It is less hysterical here than in films such as Volver but, if we consider this as late-stage Almodovar, then the film maker has emerged in his maturity as a rival to Bergman in his analysis of the human condition.

The casting is perfect. Other directors might have taken one actor and aged her up or down as the story demands. Almodovor correctly shuns this artifice. Ugarte as the younger Julieta and Suarez as the older woman are plainly two versions of the same character. Both actors are pitch perfect; it is not difficult to see the younger woman in Suarez’s performance and vice versa. It’s also wonderful to see the return of Almodovar favourite Rossy de Palma as a Mrs Danvers style housekeeper who adds to the Hitchcockian subtext.

From start to finish Julieta is a joy which should be celebrated as a return to form of a masterly director and is one of those rare must-see movies.

There might be a good film in here, but Suicide Squad isn't it

Will Smith, Margot Robbie and the gang

It’s hard to know where to start with Suicide Squad. It’s not as bad as some would have you believe but, that said, it’s a long way from good. It has its moments but there aren’t enough of them and the end result is a film that is just really, poorly made. A mess.

A camel, they say, is a horse designed by a committee. Suicide Squad is a camel of epic proportions. There is no clear vision here, no obvious hand on the tiller, and the result is a film that is tossed hither and yon at the whim of whichever opinion held sway on the day.

There is a process in the film industry known as ‘Frankensteining’. It’s used for producing trailers and involves getting a number of production houses to make trailers for different demographics. At the end of the day the studio, just like Victor Frankenstein, generally assembles the key trailer from the component parts of the others.

That’s exactly what seems to have happened here. The tone of Suicide Squad is wildly different from the hugely successful trailer which promised all sorts of edgy fun which the film doesn’t deliver. However the company which produced the trailer was apparently hired by Warner Bros to cut a version of the film and this is what we are seeing. That might explain the jokes which are generally amusing, but completely random, and the fact that the film effectively starts twice. The nominal director David Ayer’s cut is reportedly much darker, Heaven help us.

Say what you like about Marvel but they know how to construct a movie universe. They lay the groundwork, they have a strategy which makes Stalin’s Five Year plan seem a little scatter brained, and they hire bright directors who can work within the framework.

DC on the other hand have been unable to replicate their small screen success on the big screen. This I think is because the successful TV franchises are overseen by comic book people whereas the movies are overseen by movie people; and they just don’t get it. Marvel has its own shop whereas DC is, and has been for some time, part of the Warner empire.

Where Marvel get smart, imaginative, agile directors like Jon Favreau, Shane Black, Joss Whedon, and the Russos, DC’s franchise is in the dead hands of Zack Snyder, aided and abetted by Brett Ratner. Snyder’s career is the visual equivalent of someone yelling ‘This is Sparta’ in your face for two hours. He doesn’t do subtlety, nor does his co-conspirator Ratner, a man whose contribution to cinema is the Rush Hour franchise and the Prison Break TV series.

Marvel would never have made a film like Suicide Squad at this stage of constructing a coherent universe which is effectively only one film old. It would be like trying to kick-start the Marvel Universe with Avengers Assemble and trying to tell a story while the audience wondered ‘Who are these guys’?

But that’s exactly where we are with Suicide Squad, a group of villains being brought together, literally under pain of death, to fight on behalf of the government. The idea is that this motley crew of supervillains will operate undercover but their first assignment takes them out in the heart of Midway City to combat a world-threatening force. As the person I saw it with said ‘Why get them to do a job that the Justice League should be doing’?

Of course the Justice League doesn’t exist yet. Which is presumably why the start of this film and the mid-credit sequence have been retro-fitted to fill the gap between Batman vs. Superman and Justice League. Suicide Squad turns out to be a $175million placeholder.

Anyway there is lots of shouty and explodey mayhem in the world of perpetual night which passes for DC’s movie milieu - why are these films always so dark? – and none of it to great effect. Let’s face it when you are fighting a villain that the screenwriters haven’t even bothered to name, you can’t expect the audience to be much invested in what happens.

The film survives on the star power of Will Smith as super assassin Deadshot, Margot Robbie as the psychotic Harley Quinn, and Viola Davis as the tough as nails Amanda Waller whose idea this is. The rest are just there to make up the numbers in varying degrees of expendability.

Then there’s The Joker. So much hype was expended on this character before the film and yet he turns out to be an irrelevance as a minor plot device. It’s an extended cameo with a truly awful performance from Jared Leto whose every utterance reminds you of what a weak year it was when he won the Oscar. It was the year Matthew McConnaughey won for dieting if memory serves.

The one thing the Joker does do is highlight the film’s issue with women. It says a lot when its biggest gag comes from Batman punching a woman in the mouth. There are four strong female roles in this film and writer-director David Ayer has no idea what to do with them except fetishize Margot Robbie’s skimpy hot pants and subject her to a lot of sexualised violence. The whole submissive/abusive nature of her relationship with The Joker is also problematic, to say the least.

Structurally, even with this cut, Suicide Squad is a mess. Every time the story gathers some forward momentum it stops dead for a sentimental flashback, or some unnecessary exposition. Repeat business is the key to blockbuster status and although it has its moments it singularly fails to deliver on its promise, and is so generally lacking in overall appeal I cannot imagine anyone wanting to see it again.