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| 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.
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