Almodóvar’s most recent movie, I’m So Excited disappointed many, simply because we expected better. We knew the great Spanish auteur could, with more effort and concentration, make a very different kind of film that would seduce us and make us think. There was even the bones of a decent film in the little bit of I’m So Excited that was set on terra firma, that is the sequence that did not involve high jinks at high altitude, for most of the movie was set on a plane in flight.
The director’s 20th commercial feature differs somewhat from his previous films in that there is scarcely any humour and Julieta is a serious slice of life told with due gravity and careful attention. The film begins in the present before going back to the 1980s. Right from the off it has that kind of special rapture that marks the best of Almodóvar, which surely resides in the four films, La Ley del Deseo, La Flor De Mi Secreto, Todo Sobre Mi Madre and Volvér.
Adriana Ugarte, left plays the younger Juileta
Middle-aged Julieta (Emma Suárez) meets Beatriz (Michelle Jenner) the childhood friend of Antía, her long-estranged daughter, in a chance encounter on a Madrid street. It is a brief meeting but sufficient for Julieta to learn that her daughter (played by Priscilla Delgado as a young girl and Blanca Parés as an 18-year old) is now the mother of three children. Why are mother and daughter estranged? The reasons for the estrangement become clearer much later in the film, but we are already hooked from the off as there are sudden consequences. Julieta cancels plans to move to Portugal, to her boyfriend's puzzlement. As she writes in her diary, like an alcoholic, the relapse is fatal after the many years she has spent trying not to think about her daughter.
Emma Suárez plays the middle-aged Julieta in Almodóvar's brilliant return to form
The film subsequently flashes back to the story of the younger Julieta (Adriana Ugarte), and her relationship with the Galician fisherman Xoan, Antía’s father, played by Daniel Grao. Their relationship is hardly conventional as Xoan is married when they meet (in classic Almodóvar circumstances, his wife is, yes, in a coma.) Not only is Xoan married, but he also has a sculptress friend with whom he occasionally makes love. Nevertheless, love is blind and he and Julieta get on reasonably good, until, well, tragedy strikes.
This plot summary to what is a typically complicated Almodóvar scenario merely sketches start-up situations - to coin a phrase - and for spoiler reasons, there is no point in telling any more. Do they reconcile? Well, find out for yourself. Suffice to say that this is Almodóvar at the top of his game and Julieta must surely rank alongside the aforementioned works of genius.
Paddy Kehoe
