What is a woman? Second wave feminism stated that women can be whatever the hell they wanted to be. With Julieta, Pedro Almodovar creates a picture about women through their various stages of life and the various roles they play. Adapted from three short stories in Alice Munro’s Runaway, Julieta follows a woman through 30 years of her life, pondering her life choices, and the roles she decided to take on.
As a woman of a certain age, Julieta (Emma Suarez) is all set to move from Madrid to Portugal with her lover Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti) when she has a chance brief encounter with Beatriz, an old friend. There’s nothing unusual about the conversation, except Bea happened to have seen Julieta’s estranged daughter in Switzerland with three kids, sending Julieta into a tailspin of memories and emotion. How did she get to where she was? How has it been so long since she has seen her daughter? Why did her daughter leave like she did?
Almodovar’s film explores Julieta and all of the women around her through various choices in their lives. We see women as daughters, mothers, wives, lovers, professionals, artists, housekeepers, caretakers, friends, confidants, lesbians, heterosexuals, athletes, etc. No one woman has to take on all of these roles, but the mirrors and cycles in Julieta suggests that many women do take various forms of the roles. The central echo is that of a woman who begins as a lover, becomes a wife, gets sick and becomes a comatose dead fish, and loses their spouse to another lover. Right at the beginning, Julieta is a schoolteacher who has a romantic encounter with Xoan (Daniel Grao), a married fisherman from a coastal city. Xoan’s wife is in a coma, and Julieta moves in the week that Xoan’s wife dies. Julieta then becomes a wife and mother.
The three main men (Xoan, Lorenzo and Julieta’s father), are shoved to the background so Almodovar can explore the women in their lives. Almodovar’s storytelling is deceptively linear, but everybody is keeping secrets from each other. Julieta never told Lorenzo abut Xoan or her daughter, Xoan keeps secrets from Julieta, the daughter keeps secrets from Julieta. Though we see the world in a linear fashion, Julieta rarely sees the world through anybody else’s eyes. She’s a fundamentally self-centered narrator, even if she actively cares about and loves the people in her life.
But, then, so is everybody else. The people in Julieta are very concentrated on not rocking the boat that they’ll shut up until the little problem becomes a big problem and explodes. Though everybody forms little pockets of community, so many secrets snowball with eventual punishments in a variety of ways. Almodovar doesn’t have lessons here. He’s observing and telling a story. Though the emotions here are muted in comparison to the big feelings of All About My Mother or Volver, he doesn’t skimp on the characters. There’s so much left unsaid and so many confrontations dodged, it becomes a motif and a lifestyle. The biggest life choices come from return addresses on an envelope. Sometimes its easier to read and write than it is to communicate.