If you've seen any of Pedro Almodóvar's movies, then you should know that he often focuses on relationships, especially relationships among women. "All About My Mother", "Talk to Her" and "Volver" are among the starkest examples. Now he brings us "Julieta", focusing on a mother's guilt.The title character is a middle-aged woman planning to leave Madrid. Then she comes across her daughter's best friend, bringing back a series of unpleasant memories. Julieta suffered some of the worst tragedies earlier in her life but kept pushing forward, and this meeting prompts her to change her plans.As he tends to do in his movies, Almodóvar creates some of the most complex characters. Indeed, his female characters are the most complex of all (contrast that with Michael Bay's movies, where the women are just eye candy). But these damage caused by the previous events in Julieta's life will not go away so easily, and she does what she has to.Outstanding movie.

My interest in Almodovar is rather muted. He doesn't excel in any of the ways of presenting the world that really matter to me but he does several things more than well, so every so often I visit. There is the desire to submerge ourselves in fiction, lose ourselves to self in order to wake to a fabric that extends from self. That's Talk to Her for me. But like Woody Allen or the Coens, he has consistently worked for so long on the same motifs that coming to him is also a matter of is he particularly inspired that day. I'm pleased to say he is.In the individual pieces of cinematic craft, this is not particularly exceptional. If you're heavily inclined to how story resolves drama, you will see here something that simply trails off near the end. The symbolic motifs greet us upfront; a deer in slow-motion, tumultuous sea out the window. His bright reds on walls and the like are not something I can get excited about, in this or any film. But he is inspired today on the fundamental matter of self passing through self. He manages to do this with just a few strands of narrative. There is the young woman who was on her way to all life ahead of her that night on the train, who finds herself yanked by unexpected passion. There is the house of passion in the small fishing village, eerily explored with Hitchcock hues. And there is bewildering loss as she wanders away a widowed mother.Above all I love here the sense of transition. Almodovar does so well - his actress helps - in spinning narrative to explore tragedy. He says enough about the jittery urge for adventure as a story we throw ourselves in so that we can infer more fleeting illusion around the crushing melodrama about life breaking down. She's not just this grieving woman that another film, say, in the realist format would have simply followed around Madrid; we're privy to all this richness of her young self having set off in search. Things couldn't have only worked this way for her, it's important to see; but sometimes they do, sometimes setting out for open sea means finding yourself marooned on an island, nothing right or wrong.And Almodovar is ineluctably Spanish, meaning Catholic; so communion with the fleeting, transcendent stuff must take place firmly within ritual, in his case (just like Ruiz before) fiction. The whole is narrated by an author writing the story down as she waits in her apartment, shifting us forward and back. It speaks about the imaginative mind being burdened by the narratives of memory. For Almodovar, there is merit in the effort. Had she not stayed behind to write, she would have missed the letter. Even more pertinently for me, there is a bedridden mother (a mirrored woman) who is allowed to languish in her room, written off as an invalid. But when her daughter comes to visit, the recognition nourishes her back to her feet.

At first glance, a writer like Alice Munro is a very odd choice for Almodovar. I can't think of an artist less like the Spanish director. Her quiet, restrained and disciplined writing is the polar opposite of the man who gave us Todo sobre mi madre. Yet it works, because Almodovar is seeking a more profound way of communication, without the glamour and tawdriness he came to prominence with.Emma Suarez is very effective here; she reminds me of Annette Bening at her best. Adriana Ugarte is less accomplished, relying on a fetching smile to make her points. The other actors give good support. I liked Daniel Grao as the fisherman who wins Julieta's heart.

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.