Julieta fails to deliver a true payoff
Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta is made in the key of Alfred Hitchcock, with a focus on suspense, sexuality and emotional trauma interlocked by precise filmmaking. In Julieta, the devices are no different. But here, the titular protagonist’s (Emma Suárez) search for her alienated daughter, Antía, falls short.
The opening shot of Julieta’s billowing red blouse emphasizes the film’s underlying preoccupation with sexuality. Almodóvar wants us to know this movie is about how sexuality and loss are linked to sanity.
In present day, Julieta is a confident and stylish middle-aged woman about to move in with her partner Lorenzo (Darío Grandinetti). When she runs into Beatriz (Michelle Jenner), an old friend of her daughter Antía’s, everything changes. We deduce mother and daughter are not in touch, but what happens next is a little hard to take.
Julieta breaks it off with Lorenzo and moves back to a building she lived in long ago. She regresses. She becomes grey and old. A flashback introduces us to a time when Julieta (now played by Adriana Ugarte) was a beautiful, nomadic twentysomething teaching classical studies.
Julieta explains how she and Antía’s father began a beautiful life together, raising Antía by the sea. But over time Julieta became aware of Xoan’s infidelities and their fighting led Xoan to go boating during a storm. He didn’t survive.
Several years later, an adult Antía cuts Julieta out of her life, and the daughter-less widow becomes an emotional wreck all over again.
Without spoiling the film, it ends with the possibility of a mother-daughter reunion inspired by another loss. What’s most insulting though, is the film’s pretentious depiction of sexuality. Almodóvar’s cut-and-dry conflation of beauty with sanity feels misogynistic.
Despite these problems, Julieta is quite riveting, and the actors’ performances fill in many of the gaps.