7 out of 10
Cast:
Emma Suárez as Julieta Arcos
Adriana Ugarte as younger Julieta Arcos
Daniel Grao as Xoan
Inma Cuesta as Ava
Priscilla Delgado as teenage Antía
Sara Jiménez as teenage Beatriz
Blanca Parés as 18 year old Antía
Michelle Jenner as 18 year old Beatriz
Darío Grandinetti as Lorenzo Gentile
Rossy de Palma as Marian
Susi Sánchez as Sara
Pilar Castro as Claudia
Joaquín Notario as Samuel
Nathalie Poza as Juana
Mariam Bachir as Sanáa
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
Julieta Review:
The great strength and the great lie of theater and film is that the audience knows more of the events of the story than the character’s do. Besides laying the groundwork for dramatic irony and tension, this relieves the audience the frustration of the fog of war which we actually live in. By the same token, elements of plot tend to take precedence over all other areas in order to keep a story moving, but potentially at the expense of depth. Finding the balance between the two is the secret to great entertainment and great storytelling, but even without the effort to go against the grain can pay dividends. Julieta is this kind of affair, slow moving but rich in character and offering generous rewards for those willing to give it the time needed.
Writer-director Pedro Almodóvar (adapting Alice Munro’s short-story Runaway) focuses on relationships as we actually live them, fractured by imperfect information or understanding and continually reformulated as we look at them in hindsight. His Julieta – played by Emma Suárez as the older, wounded version of the character and by Adriana Ugarte as her younger self in flashback – is a complex woman not sure what she wants out of life or prepared for the way it actually unfolds. In that sense she’s just like most of us and Almodóvar unfolds her slowly, hinting at relationships and outcomes but refusing to express them directly, always drawing the audience in to wonder how Julieta got to be the way she is. It’s a style and point of view perfectly expressed by Julieta’s initial meeting with her future husband Xoan (Grao) against the backdrop of a man who throws himself from a moving train. Rather than revel in the brutality of the moment, Almodóvar stays with Julieta the entire time, watching her slowly awaken as passengers run around outside the train car windows, only gradually realizing why the man who was in the seat across from her is no longer there.
This means only gradually learning how characters, introduced early, relate to one another or even what the primary conflict of the story is as Julieta writes a long put off letter to her estranged daughter Antia (Parés). Ultimately, Julieta the film is a rumination on grief, on how different people react to it, but also on how we fail to communicate our deepest thoughts and feelings to one another and how that failure shapes our relationships. As old adages go the one about never really knowing another person is long in the tooth, but that doesn’t stop Almodóvar from taking it apart and examining why it’s true. It’s the testament of a great artist that they can take the most clichéd of subject matter and pull new depths from it.
That it works as well as it does is as much a testament to the two actresses playing the title character as it does to Almodóvar’s assured direction. Ugarte in particularly has to take on much of the most emotionally complex scenes and provides the foundation Julieta rests on. While Suárez spends much of the film in a post-tragedy haze, Ugarte gets to travel with Julieta through the years and the ups and downs which imperil her marriage and her relationship with her daughter. Almodóvar’s willingness to avoid easy emotional heart wringing and Ugarte’s performance keep even the most melodramatic plot twists (and there are several) from overwhelming the delicate character work actress and director have built up.
For all of its artistry, there is a downside to this sort of storytelling. Except for the most vibrant of moments, it puts the audience at a remove from the reality of what is happening, because comprehension of the events usually follows after the fact. This has the benefit of putting the most stirring moments in the sharpest relief, but it also means waiting for them. Even a film as brief as Julieta is, just 96 minutes, can feel stretched and overlong from all the eliding. It’s not perfect by any means – in particular it leaves Antia as an enigma never fully fleshed in – but as an antidote to the modern plot-driven film, Julieta performs admirably.
