Pedro Almodóvar is heading in a new direction with his latest film.
For "Julieta" —opening in select cinemas on Wednesday, Dec. 21— the Oscar-winning Spanish auteur is taking an uncommonly restrained aesthetic approach. In adapting a trio of short stories by Canadian Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro ("Chance," "Soon" and "Silence") Almodóvar's typically vivid colors are relatively muted and his set design is stripped-down.
The film, shot by director of photographyJean-Claude Larrieu and under the art direction ofAntxon Gómez, is still gorgeous to look at, but the visuals mainly serve to supplement a universal story of grief and loss.
Julieta, played at different stages of her life by Adriana Ugarte and Emma Suarez, is a character overcome with grief and guilt, first due to the accidental death of her husband and later after she is abandoned by her teenage daughter.
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"When you’re dealing with a story between mother and daughter, it’s very easy to fall into melodrama," Almodóvar said. "And at some level, I felt I would almost be subverting Alice Munro’s material if I had allowed it to become a melodrama. And especially if you’re thinking about the kind of pain, especially this kind of pain, I felt that it required a lot of discretion, even discretion on my part, to come near Julieta’s pain."
"Julieta," Almodóvar's 20th full-length feature film, is being released stateside by Sony Pictures Classics during the 30th anniversary year of El Deseo S.A., his and his brother Agustin's production company.
After all of this time, Almodóvar, 67, is still finding new ways to express himself and to entertain his worldwide audience. The National Board of Review named "Julieta" one of the year's top foreign language films, and it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film by the Critics' Choice Awards.
"That doesn’t mean all of my movies will be told and will be said and narrated in the same way," Almodóvar said."But it was a kind of discovery for me just to know that I could do thisbecause this tone represents myself as a director more than the baroque ways that I experimented in the past. I don’t mean that I’m regretting my other movies, no no, but this represents me more at this moment in my life."
Pursuing his own vision also meant Almodóvar had to know where to stay true to Munro's source material and where to take ownership of the work. While he'd originally considered making the film in English and with an American actress, Almodóvar ultimately chose to set the movie in his home country.
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"Munro’s stories talk about something that I feel very (drawn to), always:familyrelations, mothers, daughters, this is stuff I feel very close to," Almodóvar said.
"But also, the family culture here (in North America) is very different from the way that we feel it in Spain. ...So when I was making the adaptation, sometimes I got the feeling that I would have to forget the original just to keep on my own pathbecause the families in Spain are very different. But in any case, it just means that I felt completely independent from Munro.
"I mean, she was very present at the moment when I had the script and I thought about how to make it, how this story should be told, then the idea of what I liked more of Munro was very present for me."
Alberto Iglesias' score, with shades of Bernard Hermann and Gustav Mahler, occasionally seems to sway the film towardthe realm of the thriller or even noir, but the mysteries in play are internal;they're questions of the heart.
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"It’s very mysterious, the fact that a daughter just erased her mother without a word," Almodóvar said."We all know that these things happen, but it is really very mysterious. It doesn’t matter here or in Spain or wherever.
"I mean here, it’s more common that the kids, once they go to university or to college, they separate, basically, in many senses from the family. But when someone escapes from your life, someone who has been living with you during 18 years, this is very mysterious. That was also something that appealed to me a lot."
JULIETA
WHEN/WHERE: Opening in select theaters Wednesday, Dec. 21
INFO: 98 minutes, rated R, a Sony Pictures Classics release
ONLINE:sonyclassics.com/julieta
