Good movie but grossly overrated

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

In Madrid, the middle-aged Julieta (Emma Suárez) is packing her books to move to Portugal with her boyfriend Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti). She goes shopping for the journey and stumbles upon Bea (Michelle Jenner), who was the best friend of her missing daughter Antia. They talk to each other and Bea discloses that Antia is married with three children. Julieta decides to stay in Madrid; breaks with Lorenzo; and rents an apartment in her former building, hoping that Antia contacts her. She decides to write the heartbreaking story of her life since she was a young woman and met her beloved future husband and Antia´s father Xoan (Daniel Grao) until the losses of Xoan and Antia. "Julieta" is a dramatic romance by Pedro Almodóvar in a conventional style totally different from most of his previous works, since it is neither tacky nor aggressive to the Catholic Church; and using neither bright colors nor bizarre characters. Indeed it is a mature work disclosing the story of a middle-aged depressed woman that has her life affected for the loss of her beloved husband first and the last twelve years for the disappearance of her eighteen year-old daughter. The most important, the powerful drama never becomes a melodramatic soap-opera. The screenplay is very well-written with a perfect open end and magnificent cast. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Julieta"

Dearest Almodóvar:(I write this open letter out of courtesy in English.) Rocking the world of colors since the early 1980s with full frontal confrontations between the sexes. "Julieta" has become no exemption, yet the wild years with "Matador" (1986) or "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" (1989) seem harder and harder to be of exposure in your recent pictures. Nature as a destructive force as the bull-attack in "Talk To Her" (2002), marking the peak of a director/writer's career, which follows bio-metric cycles as life itself connected with an ocean's tide, calmness bringing shots in "Julieta". The 2016 version of an "Almodóvar Picture" gets between the gap of generations, entangles their emotions, first being a creek to jump over, nowadays a gorge with miles and miles to go around or building an cliff-hanging hard-wire of life-threatening proportions between children and their parents. As usual you keep a tight grip of your cast, which seems to the very last supporting role in care-taking hands. Yet "Julieta" strikes no nerves anymore as "The Skin I Live In" (2011) did with mask-ripping forces; tensions between the characters kept to an minimum, making the picture a pleasant one-time watch of your standard color balance in production design, leaving me wishing for another breakthrough cinematographic action as cameras hitting asphalt in "All About My Mother" (1999).Sincerely Yours,Felix Alexander Dausend

Well-learned in the classic "women's films" of directors John Stahl, Douglas Sirk and R.W. Fassbinder, Almodovar lays an egg with this bland and surprisingly uninteresting adaptation of short stories by Alice Munro. What read so well on the printed page fails to translate to the big screen this time.The many failings of the work include: workmanlike but unimpressive acting by all the principals; unsubtle telegraphing of key plot elements or twists (e.g. the inevitable lesbian subplot; omission of the two key scenes of the story (daughter's disappearance and reunion with her finale), as if not showing them represents "subtlety" (but in fact robs the viewer of important payoffs and release of tension); and overall a remote approach more suitable to a hack than the flamboyant, once innovative infant terrible Pedro.Even the topical or cultural references are poor: name-dropping Kim Basinger and Angela Molina in one of the heroine's flashback scenes as a substitute teacher of Classics curriculum, or the use of Ulysses and his saga as counterpoint to the banal life history of our heroine. Molina's reference is apt for film buffs as she was THE go-to actress in the heyday of Spanish cinema decades back, but it also indicates a hint as to the film's casting, since she was so famously the 1/2 of the actress duo (with the stunning beauty Carole Bouquet) who both starred as Conchita in Bunuel's classic "That Obscure Object of Desire". Pedro has Emma Suarez as Julieta the older, and Adriana Ugarte as her at a younger flashback age, and both actresses give earnest performances, with zero sparkle or pizazz. The drama has been drained from the film, while fans of yesteryear's twin genres of soap opera and melodrama deserve and yearn for just that: dramatic eruptions or even over-the-top outbursts at crucial or climactic moments. Almodovar niggardly denies the viewer such enjoyment, particularly by leaving out the ending of the film entirely. It's not a shaggy-dog movie (leave that cruelty to the Coen Bros.) but has the same sort of "I've been cheated" result when the end credits roll. My takeaway is that the mature (nay, over-the-hill) Aldomovar has honed his craftsmanship to such perfection that the life force (that characterized his early work and propelled him to international acclaim) no longer exists in his films. Instead we have a brick-by-brick professionalism, evidenced in some quality if sparing imagery and mechanical connective footage that one should take for granted. It's a lazy, blah approach that seems to have overtaken all my heroes as a younger film buff from decades past, fellow Film Festival circuit titans like Wenders, Jarmusch, et al.

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.