Julieta

The last few weeks have been pretty busy, so this is an attempt to get up to date before the holiday period.

The clocks went forward at the end of March and experience of past seasons has shown that the audience for our screenings declines rapidly once the evenings get lighter: hence we scheduled one final screening for the last day of March. We had chosen Julieta the first subtitled film we have screened this season, and as we set up we wondered if anyone other than the committee would turn up. In the event there was no need to worry as we had an audience of more than 20...

I was pleased to finally catch up with the film as it had been on my "to see" list since I read the reviews. I've not read any of the stories by Alice Munro on which it is based so cannot comment on the authenticity - or otherwise - of the adaptation, but I very much enjoyed the film and thought that the unresolved ending was brilliant.

Here are my notes:

Julieta

Spain 2016       99 minutes

Director:          Pedro Almodóvar Pedro

Starring:            Emma Suarez, Adrian Ugarte, Daniel Grao, and Inma Cuesta

Awards and Nominations

• Nomination for Palme d’Or at 2016 Cannes Film Festival
• BAFTA Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film
• A further nine wins and 45 nominations

“Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, his most moving and entrancing work since 2006’s Volver, is a sumptuous and heartbreaking study of the viral nature of guilt, the mystery of memory and the often unendurable power of love. At times, the emotional intrigue plays more like a Hitchcock thriller than a romantic melodrama, with Alberto Iglesias’s superb Herrmannesque score … heightening the noir elements, darkening the bold splashes of red, blue and white.”

Mark Kermode

Antia abandoned her mother Julieta without warning 12 years ago and has not spoken to her since. As a result of a chance encounter which gives her news of her daughter, Julieta returns to her former home to look for Antia while at the same time reviewing the events that led to their estrangement.

The film is an adaptation of three short stories from the book Runaway by Nobel Prize winning author Alice Munro in which the same character appears at different stages of her life. Almodóvar is a great fan of Munro’s writing and earlier in his career had been interested in adapting the stories as his first English language film. He had discussed making the film in Vancouver, where Munro had based her stories, with Meryl Streep playing the main character at 20, 40 and 60 years old, but abandoned the project  as he was unhappy about filming outside of Spain and was uncomfortable about writing and filming in English. Years later he revisited the script but, at the suggestion of his production team, the film would be made in Spanish and set in Spain. He had originally intended to call the film Silence, the title of one of the short stories, but changed this to avoid confusion with Martin Scorsese’s historical drama Silence which was released in 2016.

 After the socio-political satire of I’m So Excited (2013) Almodóvar explained that Julieta was a return to drama and his “cinema of women”, but that the tone was different to his other feminine dramas such as The Flower of My Secret (1995) All About My Mother (1999) and Volver (2006). Despite the proposed involvement of Meryl Streep in his earlier attempt to film the stories Almodóvar now decided to cast two actresses to play the younger and older versions of the film’s protagonist. Almodóvar has often been inspired by classic Hollywood and European films and the double casting in Julieta is a homage to Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) in which two actresses play younger and older versions of the same character. The influence of Hitchcock is also visible in the film and its soundtrack has deliberate echoes of the Bernard Herrmann’s classic soundtrack for Vertigo (1958).

The film received its international premiere at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where it was received warmly but did not win any awards. It subsequently received a BAFTA nomination for Best Foreign Language film (losing out to Son of Saul) but, somewhat controversially, was omitted from the shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017 Academy Awards in Hollywood.

Here is the trailer: