By Christine Westwood
In Spanish cinema, there was Luis Bunuel, and then there was Pedro Almodovar. At the forefront of the new wave of Spanish film, freed from the restrictions of Franco’s dictatorship, Almodovar pursued his craft with an exuberance and commitment that has never wavered. Absolutely transgressive when it comes to religion, sex, gender, identity, drug use, and the supernatural, his films are littered with murders and suicides, mystery and farce. His eye accepts every twist and turn of human nature without boundaries or judgements. Everything is depicted with an even hand, to the point that even the bizarre or depraved take on a quality of innocence.
This “Almodovar View” is like that of a curious child, but married to sophistication of technique, with a mature perfectionism in every detail, and a sumptuous visual eye. Extraordinary surreal details make no attempt to be lifelike, yet are depicted entirely as though they are. Almodovar has always chosen actors willing to go the distance and beyond, who are able to inhabit their characters with so much conviction that their neuroses, compulsions, and desires appear logical. Of course, life isn’t logical – people are driven by strange, idiosyncratic compulsions all the time – but in Almodovar’s world, there is no attempt to justify or rationalise them.
Julieta is the director’s 20th feature film, and possibly his most delicately handled, with every detail polished yet left open to deeper layers of emotional meaning. Premiering in Australia at The Sydney Film Festival, the film titles open with a swathe of lush red fabric that fills the screen. It moves rhythmically as its wearer (Emma Suarez, playing a bereft mother) breathes in and out. The symbolism is blood, life, birth, and death, and it is this archetypal landscape that Almodovar explores in his tale of a mother and her estranged daughter. Their bond and separation, and the cycle of lives and tragic deaths that unfold around them, is a primal emotional landscape, as are the interconnections that we can’t escape. The film explores how we need each other, and the cycle of life as daughters take the place of ageing mothers, and mothers become dependent in their turn.
In genre, the film is a mystery, as we follow the mother’s poignant remembering and uncovering of the loss of her daughter. There are many echoes of Almodovar’s motifs: a file of newspaper clippings holding clues, a melodramatic turning to comic moments, and the easy familiarity yet secrecy between characters. In Julieta, these are employed with a light, sensitive hand that makes every detail ring with emotional impact. Originally, the film was planned as the director’s English-language debut, and was set to star Meryl Streep, who would have played three versions of the character at 20, 40 and 60 years of age. American locations were found, and Streep was on board, but Almodovar ditched the idea, uncomfortable with working outside his native language and Spanish locations.
Almodovar’s gorgeous visual aesthetic is here in the bold and elegant palette, and the dramatic, colour drenched compositions. The film is loosely based on three stories by Alice Munro. Suarez plays the mature Julieta, with Adriana Ungarte taking on the same character as a young woman, an homage to a similar device uitlised by Luis Bunuel in That Obscure Object Of Desire (1977).
Speaking at The Cannes Film Festival in May, Almodovar described how he “battled a lot with the actresses’ tears, against the physical need to cry. It is a very expressive battle. It wasn’t out of reservedness, but because I didn’t want tears. What I wanted was dejection – the thing that stays inside after years and years of pain. I adore melodrama – it’s a noble genre, a truly great genre – but I was very clear that I didn’t want anything epic. I wanted something else. Simply put, this had to be a very dry, tearless film.”
Julieta had mixed reviews in America, but French and British critics were generally favourable. As with all his films, Almodovar’s success comes from his respect for his female characters, and his collaborations with the remarkable actresses who play them. Carmen Maura, Cecilia Roth, and Chus Lampreav were regular stars in his early films, with Maura notably appearing in What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984), the international breakout Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1987) and the Oscar winning All About My Mother (1991), which also featured a young Penelope Cruz in a standout performance as a young nun.
As a mature actress, Cruz went on to become Almodovar’s muse in the gorgeous Volver (2006), which also featured Maura and Lampreav, followed by her turn as a blind writer in the noir thriller, Broken Embraces (2009). Notable male actors also made their start in Almodovar’s ensemble. Javier Bardem was a paraplegic basketball player in Live Flesh (1997), while Antonio Banderas has featured in seven films by Almodovar, from his first screen appearance in Labyrinth Of Passion (1982) up to recent movies like The Skin I Live In (2011) and I’m So Excited (2013), which is perhaps the director’s least successful work, in spite of Cruz also being cast. Banderas’ most notable film with Almodovar is Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (1989) in which he plays an escaped mental patient opposite Victoria Abril in the role of an ex-porn star.
Pedro Almodovar has an acute sense of what his actors bring to the camera, and in the book, Almodovar On Almodovar, he described Antonio Banderas as possessing a naturally joyful quality that an audience warms to, even if he’s playing a psychopath. The director contrasts this quality with those of Mexican actor, Gael Garcia Bernal, with whom Almodovar worked on the riveting noir, Bad Education (2004), a tale of priests, sex abuse, drug addicts, and revenge. The director hoped to elicit something playful in Bernal, but in the end, he had to accept that the actor didn’t have this kind of softness, but rather a ruthless quality that Almodovar went with instead to depict Bernal’s triple character of Angel, Juan, and the femme fatale transvestite, Sahara.
Bad Education includes motifs that we find again in Julieta. There are the meticulously stored newspaper clippings, the layers of mystery that draw us in to the characters’ unfolding tragedy, the multiple role playing, the edge of melodrama, and the powerfully seductive cinematography. In Julieta, Almodovar has created, on the surface, his most conventional and formal film to date. The tight and elegant structure seems appropriate to hold his theme of deep sadness. High camp and extreme melodrama may not be evident, but as Steve Pond wrote in The Wrap, “even a subdued Almodovar is still weird.” Like him or loathe him, Almodovar’s productivity, unfettered creativity, and exhaustive perfectionism earn him the badge of a true artist. He has given his life to film, and he continues to entertain, shock, and challenge himself and his audiences. His motto is encapsulated in his studio’s masthead – “El Deseo”, with the translation being “The Desire.”
Julieta screens at The Sydney Film Festival, which runs from June 8-19. To buy tickets to Julieta, click here.
