Almodóvar finds his form
Julieta 15 cert, 98 min
Dir Pedro Almodóvar Starring Emma Suárez, Adriana Ugarte, Daniel Grao, Michelle Jenner, Inma Cuesta, Nathalie Poza, Rossy de Palma Pedro Almodóvar’s 20th film, Julieta, has a magnificent score from his trusty composer Alberto Iglesias, which cites musical motifs of all sorts and fuses them into a lithe, jazzinflected suite. There’s a respectful variation on Barber’s Adagio, when the main character has to identify a body. And when her daughter, Antía, is conceived on a night train, Iglesias brings in a breathy snatch of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.
Everything changes for Julieta (short-cropped blonde Adriana Ugarte, a terrific near-newcomer) on that train. She’s just met fellow passenger Xoan (Daniel Grao), a hunky, bearded fisherman whose wife has been in a coma for five years. Together, they’ve had to witness the suicide of an older man, for which Julieta blames herself.
This guilt at failing to save a stranger’s life prefigures the same, and much more devastating, reaction to a later bereavement. Julieta before and Julieta after this loss are two different people: the older one is played with fine-tuned unhappiness by Emma Suárez, and the film is a baton being passed from one actress to the other.
The mid-way moment when Ugarte’s Julieta, already adrift in her grief, becomes Suárez’s Julieta, about to experience a brutal, plaster-ripping rift with the now-teenaged Antía, is managed with an elegant flourish. Julieta is being lavishly towelled off after washing her hair, et voilà – the switch has been made.
This duet is one of Almodóvar’s simpler but more satisfying conceits of late, and the actressy emphasis of the film is a welcome return to his foremost obsessions, especially after the campy, male-dominated misfire of I’m So Excited! (2013). It’s one of his least crazy films in narrative terms, but the colours and textures he’s coaxed from a new director of photography, Jean-Claude Larrieu, are even more intoxicating than ever.
His source is three short stories – Chance, Soon and Silence – by the Canadian writer Alice Munro, taken from her unforgettable 2004 collection, Runaway, which focused on the character of Juliet Henderson at three different moments in her life.
Julieta’s mother is a fading invalid and her father is becoming involved with her nurse. The idea of betraying an incapacitated spouse, whether before or shortly after death, links this situation with Julieta’s and Xoan’s.
Julieta’s unforgiving estrangement from her father then makes Antía’s walkout, which happens so quickly, something of a taste of her mother’s own medicine. Guilt here is a virus, spreading deep into a person’s marrow and becoming airborne, too – it’s an invisible plague even in this film’s sunniest, most sumptuous parts. Xoan’s waterside home on the Ferrol estuary is eye candy to live in, but we know the sunshine can’t last.
Suarez’s Julieta remembers the stormclouds rolling in, and though hardly to blame for the fatefulness of the weather, she’s been living under them ever since. If she could only see what we see – the resplendence of the film she’s in – it might not lay these demons wholly to rest, but it would definitely lure her towards the light.