It's true, Julieta is Almodóvar's least hysterical movie. The most atypical. The post-punk look is just anecdotal and its characters are not the heroines to which we are used to. It is a narratively mature drama, harmonious, with an air of Greek tragedy and terrible myth that goes through the film. It is about weak women, fragile women, broken women. The melancholic light and Hopper's colour palette create a very suitable scenario where this family drama unfolds. The movie keeps a very determined narrative tone and is a very enjoyable aesthetic experience. The loneliness and the pain caused by the passage of time are the real main characters of the film. The depression and the unbearable guilt as well. And the spleen of the Atlantic. And the emptiness.

It's usually worth watching an Almodovar movie if only for the exquisite use he makes of the camera and the quality of acting he manages to extract from his cast. That is certainly the case with Julieta in which every scene is beautifully composed. Andalusia, Galicia and Madrid have never looked so enticing. Having said that, the narrative of this movie is really poor. It revolves in some sense around the theme of guilt but that doesn't stand up well to a close examination. The twist at the close is pure melodrama and the film doesn't really end at all. Almodovar just brings down the shutters on the movie. So this is very much a mixed bag. Lovely filming, lovely actors, lovely decor, but dare I say it, this is basically an art-house soap.

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.

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.