Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta is a moving, carefully controlled drama of maternal grief, carried by Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte. Its reluctance to explain people sometimes frustrates, but the performances give us reason to stay.
Julieta is a moving melodrama whose restraint mostly earns our patience. Pedro Almodóvar is interested in how a woman lives with guilt when remembering the past brings little relief, and he gives that question room to trouble us. The colours are bright, but the story offers few distractions from her unhappiness. This is concentrated filmmaking, and although its guarded characters occasionally make the drama feel remote, the two actresses sharing the central role keep us involved.
Emma Suárez plays Julieta Arcos, with Adriana Ugarte as her younger self, and the casting makes the passage of time felt without demanding a running explanation. Each actress suggests someone who has difficulty measuring her own share of responsibility. We were moved by Emma Suárez’s stillness: she makes speaking about the past look like an effort Julieta can barely afford. Adriana Ugarte keeps the younger woman from seeming merely an illustration of what went wrong. The differences between the performances are allowed to remain.
Jean-Claude Larrieu’s cinematography makes particularly forceful use of red, a colour that keeps drawing attention even when the acting is subdued. It gives the images an energy the characters cannot always summon. Antxón Gómez’s production design is equally assertive, making the surroundings worth studying without quite letting them take over. There are moments when the finish seems too immaculate for the distress being described, but the brightness also prevents grief from becoming a succession of dutifully grey images.
José Salcedo’s editing has the more difficult job of keeping the flashbacks intelligible while allowing recollection to feel incomplete. For the most part, the shifts in time sharpen our interest in Julieta without making the chronology difficult to follow. Alberto Iglesias’s score introduces an unease closer to a thriller, encouraging us to expect trouble even when little is happening. It works because the music supplies tension without requiring the performances to grow louder, although it can raise expectations of an explanation the screenplay is reluctant to provide.
That reluctance is the chief weakness in Pedro Almodóvar’s screenplay. We can accept that people hurt one another for reasons they struggle to explain, but at times the film makes their behaviour so difficult to read that our sympathy has little to work with. Julieta’s guilt receives careful attention; the motives of those around her receive less. The central performance sometimes has to persuade us of things a conversation might have helped us understand.
Melodrama usually gives its characters an opportunity to say the thing they have been suppressing. This one spends longer considering why they cannot speak, a decision that suits the subject even when it slows the film. The concentration on family, memory and abandonment leaves little space for comic relief. We miss that release occasionally, though a livelier treatment would also risk making Julieta’s pain easier to dismiss.
At 98 minutes, the film does not need to hurry, and its patience is often justified by the attention paid to its leading women. Both performances reward the time spent watching them, even when the writing gives us less help than we need. The film asks for concentration without making a great ceremony of its seriousness. See it when there is time afterwards for a conversation that may not begin straight away.
