SoTrumpBelieve Must See Movie...

Inmechon The movie's only flaw is also a virtue: It's jammed with characters, stories, warmth and laughs.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Jugu Abraham Before the end credits rolled out, my feeling was "At last a great film from Almodovar with a mesmerizing performance from Emma Suarez as the older Julieta." That feeling, unfortunately, was short lived. Almodovar had not written the story--many of his other works are his own. Almodovar had merely adapted the stories of Nobel Prize winning Canadian author Alice Munro. I have never read Munro to date but the depth of the story line urges me to do so fast. She is great!The film is also memorable for Emma Suarez' screen presence as the older Julieta. So was the choice of the music and the paintings used in the film. This is for me the most likable Almodovar film and yet it does not belong to him: it belongs to the Canadian lady. One got the feeling you were watching the filmed version of a modern day Dostoyevsky without the religion and Russian connections. Anyway thanks to you Mr Almodovar for your decision to make this film as also to Ms Sarah Polley for making "Away from Her," some 10 years ago, another film that used the writings of Ms. Munro.

maurice yacowar In the first scene Julieta packs in bubble wrap a clay-brown sculpture, which becomes perhaps the film's key symbol. As we later learn, it's a bronze sculpture by Ava, the artist friend of Julieta's first love Xoan. This very modern abstraction of a seated male is marked by three inflections. The penis rampant is abruptly truncated exposing a hole. A Lynn Chadwick-style triangle replaces the head, rendering the human into an abstraction. It emphasizes the rational and impersonal. The terracotta surface makes the figure seem pre-Colombian and light. But despite the clay colour Ava has cast her human figure in bronze to protect it from blowing away. The first of those two details summarize the central romantic relationship. When Julieta first meets and makes love to Xoan he has a comatose wife. When Julieta comes to him the wife has just died, so their new romance flourishes. But the triangle persists. Xoan still has occasional sex with his longtime friend Ava. As Julieta's last lover, Lorenzo, is also Ava's friend she can't escape the triangular relationship. That sculpture adorns the cover of Lorenzo's book. The heavy bronze painted as flesh-like clay encapsulates Almodovar's sense of the human condition here. Clay is the source of the flesh, soft, vulnerable to the elements, especially to the wind. To survive, it needs an additional core of strength and substance. While the metallic is conventionally the emblem of a non-feeling, unemotional character, here the core that enables individuals and relationships to survive is the capacity to love and to remain committed across years of separation and misunderstanding. Thus Xoan maintains an integral commitment to both Ava and Julieta, as her father does to his helpless wife and to the girl hired to care for her. Lorenzo remains in love with Julieta despite her rejection when she decides to stay in Madrid to try to find her daughter Antia, after a 12-year alienation.Julieta's three men form a non-romantic triangle. Xoan and her father form her base: heavy muscular men with beards and a commitment to life in the elements, her fathering choosing to become a farmer and Xoan already a fisherman. In contrast Lorenzo is cerebral, academic, bald, in her maturity a refuge from her earlier men. The train passenger whose suicide haunts Julieta has the academic mien of Lorenzo and the hirsute force of Xoan and her father. The stranger has the other three men's loneliness but having failed to find their loving connection takes the train —with empty luggage — to kill himself. The other men survive their losses because they have the bronze core of love given and received. The suicide is like empty fragile clay.Yet the film escapes any feeling of abstract schema. Xoan dies in wind and water. He storms off to fish when Julieta confronts him with his affair with Ava. That is, one's emotional life may give one the stability and purpose with which to survive. But even it cannot ward off the accidents and cruelties of fate that the flesh is air to. Xoan is broken into pieces by the wind and water but Julieta identifies him by his tattoo with her and their Antia's initials. His death, like his love, brings Julieta and Ava together. They jointly pour Xoan's ashes back into the sea. The film's most enigmatic figure is Antia. We watch her from infancy into maturity but we share Julieta's loss of connection when she goes off to her spiritual retreat. When she learns what drove her father off to the storm she blames her mother and Ava for his death. Then she blames herself for having been enjoying herself at the summer camp when he died. The bronze in this human figure is the oppressive lead of guilt, which all three women have to work to transcend. On this point the clay is the constructive reminder of human vulnerability, helplessness, especially in the twisting fortunes of love. Before Antia turns against her mother she turns against her first best friend Bea. This new friendship keeps Antia at camp and takes her to her friend's home in Madrid, prolonging the period before she learns of her father's death. Antia makes Julieta move to Madrid to be closer to Bea. But Antia's friendship/love eventually grows so oppressive Bea flees her to America. That's when Anita breaks their friendship and goes to the retreat.Despite her anger Antia keeps some connection to her mother, sending a few fanciful birthday cards. For her part, Julieta marks her daughter's birthday by dumping a birthday cake into the trash three years running. Only when she has married, had three children and lost the oldest to drowning does Antia experience what her mother suffered when Xoan died. That loss, that discovery of her own vulnerability, gives Antia the strengthened core to write her mother and provide her own address, tacitly inviting the imminent visit that ends the film.

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . notes JULIETA's daughter Antia to her mom during this offering from that knotty director, Pedro Almodovar. It seems as if almost every character in this Spanish drama has gotten paralyzed by a stroke or general catatonia, if they haven't contracted Lou Gehrig's Disease or multiple sclerosis, unless they were fortunate enough to drown, get run over by a train, or hit by a bus first. What have the Spanish DONE to merit so much Bad Karma? Students of history will remember that when this nation had a chance to choose between Hitler's Jew-burning Nazi Storm Troopers or the Union Normal People Blue Collar faction championed so poignantly by Ernest Hemingway in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, the Spanish Electoral College put Hitler's puppet Franco into power for decades to come. (IS Franco still dead? This was a major mystery dragging on for months if not years in 20th Century Spain.) Just as the Americans still have not been able to purge the Deplorable Confederate Spermatozoa from their Gene Pool, Spain still is grappling with Franco's spawn, as Almodovar's Antia observes. (But what WAS is that empty briefcase left on the train??)

jdesando Adapt delicate writer Alice Munro's three short stories, take her heroine Juliet, and mix with hyperbolic writer-director Pedro Almodovar channeling Alfred Hitchcock, and you have one heck of a romantic thriller, Julieta. I realize the Spanish setting, not Munro's Canada, turns the screw of lyricism very tight, but it is after all as flamboyant, colorful (full of figurative blood reds) and, female-loving as any other of his films.As we come to know our reasonably-reliable narrator, Julieta (Emma Suarez), we discover a mature but lonely woman whose pain will be incrementally exposed to us but not too soon. She breaks the linear underpinnings of the story to take us by flashback to her younger self (Adriana Ugarte) and the birth of her eventually-estranged daughter, Antia (Priscilla Delgado, adolescent and Blanca Peres, 18 years old).Almodovar is not in a rush to reveal the toll on Julieta for her daughter's absence, and that is the beauty of this romantic drama, where her pain, loss, and guilt form a seamless portrait of a woman on a journey to self discovery. Like Odysseus (The Odyssey is alluded to in one of her young teacher sequences), only after serious confrontation with her selfishness and self-centered libido does she see the central role she plays in the seemingly random vicissitudes of life.The sea plays a its lyrical presence as well as its danger (like women): "The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea" Matthew Arnold.While women do the heavy emotional lifting and seem to hold the plot strings, as typical of Almodovar, men are actually prominent players, from a suicidal train passenger across the seat from her and a manly fisherman, Xoan (Daniel Grao) in the dining car to a splendidly-attentive writer, Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti—reminding me of Frank Langella). Without them only the loss of her daughter would not a complete drama make.A statue of a male with a powerful penis plays a part in the proceedings, suggesting the integral part sexuality plays in lives. The lesbian leitmotif is a reminder that not all sex is heterosexual nor is it without consequences, as we're reminded that existentially everyone gets what he deserves.In the end, it's women Almodovar pursues and loves with splashes of red in cars, clothes, and cakes to show female passion and his poetry. As in the current thriller Elle, these European directors can tell a whopper of a story starring women of a certain age hotter than about any young thing you can think of.The blonde in trouble and the Bernard-Hermann-like score, coupled with the puzzle-like story, may recall Hitchcock, but what we do know from both directors is never to take the vulnerable ladies for granted and always savor their depth of feeling in lives painful but eminently worth living.Almodovar is a director with an artist's eye and an unbounded affection for women Hitchcock would envy. See this film to experience just what European directors can achieve without cheap sex, gratuitous violence, or distracting special effects.