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:
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.”
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).
Here is the trailer:
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
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.
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:
