Julieta—Almodóvar’s New Film

Young Julieta just before she meet Xoan on a train.

One of the best things about seeing the latest Almodóvar movie is being immersed in a world that is not America. The scenery, the characters, the daily life and overall traditions are from the director’s Spanish realm. After several decades of his movies, we anticipate what he’s going to present us next, for it will be something that holds our attention and makes us laugh or think. Above all, it will be the latest unveiling of an artist’s work.

Music plays a dominant role in Julieta, composed by Alberto Iglesias, a familiar collaborator of Almodóvar. The tone and atmosphere of the music as the movie opens set the stage for the coming content, and it’s dark, almost haunting, and subtly ominous. Its predominant characteristic expresses the dead feeling of depression. It always stays just below the line where life percolates, and over the course of the story at key moments rises just enough to deliver suspense but still remains under that non-living line. Without the music’s role in the story arc, the tale’s simplicity and the camera’s slow study of Julieta’s state of mind might have resulted in a dull film, for as Orson Welles once said: “Films should be able to tell you a story quicker than any other medium.” But Julieta succeeds in its objective of studying a woman’s loss, and loss is not something easily captured in words. The visual portrayal of loss has more power, and Emma Suárez, who plays the middle-aged Julieta, holds us still in our witnessing of her static grief, which is depression.

Julieta is loosely based on three short stories by the Canadian Nobel Prize–winner Alice Munro. The stories have been moved to a Spanish milieu and processed through the imagination of Spain’s greatest filmmaker. The opening music shares the screen with sensual red folds of fabric that then wrap a contemporary sculpture of a terracotta man with a oversized pipe for a penis.  An important blue envelope is thrown into the trash. We come to understand that Julieta is moving, packing and throwing out, cutting ties to her past. Her boyfriend, an art critic Lorenzo, arrives and their brief conversation tells us they are a happy couple moving to Portugal. In the next scene, Julieta encounters Bea, her daughter Antía’s closest childhood friend, and learns that Antía lives in Como. We witness Julieta’s stunned and ravaged face as she grasps onto this news of her daughter, and from that moment on, the movie delves into the past and how Julieta lost contact with Antía. She ends her plans to move to Portugal with Lorenzo. She rents an available apartment in the same building where she and Antía once lived on the off chance that Antía will try to reach her after thirteen years. She sits down, opens a large notebook, and begins writing to Antía the story of what happened to them. This narrative becomes the story of the movie, with Adriana Ugarte playing the younger, bombshell Julieta.

Middle-aged Julieta writing the story of what happened.

Colors mark the movie, deep saturated colors that deliver mystery and mood, or flamboyant colors like young Julieta’s shock of bleached hair and her bright facial make-up and clothing. We’re treated to idyllic seaside views of her lover Xoan’s home—he’s a hunky Galician fisherman played by Daniel Grao. The terra cotta figure with pipe penis seems to symbolize him, for the hottest passion imaginable strikes these two characters at the beginning of Julieta’s memoir to Antía, and results in Antía’s conception and the future of the family.

Just the way the music is almost ominous, almost sinister, Xoan’s housekeeper Maria (Inma Cuesta) fills us with uneasiness—is she good or bad? Her face when dealing with Julieta is cold and inscrutable, possibly plotting evil, but later with the teenage Antía, she shows her warmth and affection. This kind of suspense in character and music keeps us waiting for something to happen, and though something does, a tragedy, a loss, it’s not violent or visually traumatic. It’s depression.

The movie successfully explores depression caused by tragedy and loss. Perhaps the ambivalence an audience might feel when the movie ends has to do with not really feeling close to Julieta or Antía, despite comprehending their interior worlds through their facial and physical communication. We remain on the objective, viewing side of a situation, our minds involved but not our hearts, as if the work is a study.

It’s an incongruence in the movie that Xoan’s home and Julieta’s Madrid apartments are upper middle class in décor and possessions. She comes from a teacher’s background and Xoan is a fisherman, but their lifestyle, and her outfits, couldn’t be more bourgeois. Those furnishings for the characters stand out and remove the viewer from the willing suspension of disbelief. For Almodóvar fans, Julieta will be worth seeing as the latest from an artist’s oeuvre, but it won’t be as powerful as Bad Education (about Catholic-priest sex abuse) or Talk to Her (about friendship and love), or even, for those who can take it, the macabre thriller The Skin I Live In.