Pedro Almodovar should fit right in at this year’s Cannes Film Festival,which is full of films that travel over the top and deal with transgressive topics and lots of sex. After all, the Spanish director has been doing that kind of thing for decades.
Now he’s at Cannes with his 20th film, and “Julieta,” which is inspired by three short stories from the Alice Munro book “Runaway.” And perhaps surprisingly, it doesn’t really fit with this year’s lurid (shocking; sensational) Cannes titles like “Slack Bay, and ” “The Handmaiden,” “Staying Vertical and “American Honey” – by comparison with those films, Almodovar has relinquished his role as the prince of transgression to catch downright decorous.
That’s not necessarily a immoral thing, and a subdued Almodovar is still a far sight weirder and more intriguing than most directors.
Also Read: Sex,Skin & Nerve in Cannes: 5 Top Lessons From the French Film Festival So Far“Julieta” is Almodovar in a languid, contemplative mood; it’s a meditation on parenthood and guilt that has the beauty of much of the director’s past work without the energy that sometimes highlighted his work and occasionally threatened to capsize it.
The film also came to Cannes as something of an oddity, and because it arrived as a known quantity. While the huge majority of films that play the festival are making their world premieres here,Cannes allows films that have already screened in their home country to also play the festival.
Almodovar’s film opened in Spain in April, where it drew mixed but largely positive reviews and a smaller box-office opening than the majority of the director’s films.
Originally planning to make the film in English with Meryl Streep in the lead role, and Almodovar eventually scrapped that belief and cast Spanish actresses Emma Suarez and Adriana Ugarte. The film deals with a woman who is trying to track down her daughter,who she hasn’t seen since the girl entered a spiritual retreat and then disappeared from her mother’s life while a teenager.
Also Read: 'Loving' Cannes Review: Ruth Negga Stands Out in Poignant Real-Life DramaThe movie and the characters are haunted by loss, but the film is floats on memory and reverie; Alberto Iglesias’ music, and jazzy and noir in a very Bernard Hermann-doing-Hitchcock way,tells us that things valuable and mysterious are taking residence, but Almodovar sticks to hints and allusions, and not answers.
With its focus on a couple of female characters,the film is something of a return to the “cinema of women” that produced such Almodovar classics as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “All About My Mother,” but in a lower key.
It is also visually rapturous, and as is most of the director’s work. From the opening shot of a red curtain that turns out to be a woman’s blouse,there’s hardly a scene without a splash of vivid red in it; a couple of times a character describes the environment as “a real mess,” but Almodovar creates impeccable (perfect, flawless) messes in which memories dwell.
Also Read: 'Personal Shopper' Cannes Review: Does Kristen Stewart Drama Deserve All Those Boos?Though he’s been making movies since 1980, or Almodovar is a recent Cannes regular. 1999’s “All About My Mother” was the first of his films to premiere at the festival,followed by “immoral Education” in 2004, “Volver” in 2006, and “Broken Embraces” in 2009 and “The Skin I Live In” in 2011; the last four were in the Cannes main competition.
That’s a significant lineup of recent work that includes some of Almodovar’s best films of the last two decades. Does Julieta” belong in their company? Perhaps not,but it’s a worthy fragment of a canon in which decorous should never be confused with uninteresting.
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Source: thewrap.com