Pedro Almodóvar (2016)
According to a piece that appeared in the Canadian current affairs magazine Macleans when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 2013, her work was adapted for the screen as long ago as 1974. Until 2002, the adaptations were television pieces, broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; they took the form of one-off dramas or made-for-TV movies or, in one case, a mini-series. Fourteen years ago, the cinema adaptations of Munro began. Edge of Madness (based on ‘The Wilderness Station’) was followed, four years later, by Sarah Polley’s Away from Her (based on ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’). In 2013, Liza Johnson made Hateship, Loveship (based on ‘Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage’). Except for Away from Her, which enjoyed international success thanks largely to Julie Christie’s performance as a woman suffering from presenile dementia, these films haven’t had much impact. Munro isn’t the easiest writer to adapt effectively for the screen. It’s not easy either to explain why but a short online piece by Cameron Bailey[1], currently the artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival, describes something of the challenges involved:
‘Her stories don’t succeed thanks to brief, indelible character portraits, though they often include that. They don’t work because of the wry reversals in narrative that drive so many other short stories. What I’ve loved about Munro’s fiction is her description of the massive shifts in emotion and insight that take place in the smallest of lives: the felt regret, the revelation of hidden rage or desire, the stunning, unspoken contradictions that drive human behaviour every day. … This stuff is hard to put up on a movie screen. Actors have a hard time with it, since it requires communicating at least two different emotions at once. Dialogue does it a disservice, often reducing nuance to blaring announcements of character. The best directors can do it only when they turn all elements of cinema – words, performance, composition, rhythm, sound and silence – towards evoking the layers of Munro’s writing.’
The best thing about Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta is that it provides an excuse for – and the treat of – rereading the three Alice Munro stories on which it’s based. The worst thing about the film is that, with those stories fresh in the mind, it comes across as a bland travesty of Munro. The main interest of the movie is in speculating, then finding out more about, why Almodóvar was keen to make cinema from the written words of an artist so temperamentally different from himself. The source stories – ‘Chance’, ‘Soon’ and ‘Silence’ – are consecutive pieces in Munro’s 2004 collection Runaway. Almodóvar, who bought the film rights in 2009, has been quoted as saying that he was drawn especially to the scenes on a train in ‘Chance’[2]. He also saw the project as an opportunity to write his first screenplay in English and to shoot his first film in North America. The Munro stories, centred on a protagonist called Juliet, span a period of approaching forty years and Almodóvar, according to a recent article in Vanity Fair, at first envisaged Meryl Streep playing Juliet throughout his film. Streep was interested but Almodóvar then had second thoughts both about filming in the USA or Canada and about writing English dialogue. The project was put on ice and re-emerged with a Spanish script and setting, and with two actresses as the renamed Julieta – Emma Suárez the older woman and Adriana Ugarte the younger.
In Munro’s first story, ‘Chance’, set in 1965, twenty-one-year-old Juliet, a Classics graduate, is travelling on a train to take up a temporary teaching appointment at a girls’ private school in Vancouver. Her reading of The Greeks and the Irrational by E R Dodds is interrupted by a middle-aged man, evidently anxious for companionship as well as conversation during the long train journey. Juliet makes clear that she doesn’t want to supply either and goes to sit elsewhere. Shortly after the next station stop, the train comes to an unscheduled halt after hitting something on the line. This something turns out to be the man who wanted to talk; Juliet blames his suicide on her earlier unsociability. She gets into conversation with – and seeks reassurance from – another male passenger, one of those who had helped carry the corpse back onto the train. Juliet and this second man, whose name is Eric, take an immediate liking to each other. She tells him where she’s going, including the name of the school where she’ll be teaching. On the day Juliet’s appointment there ends, she receives a letter from Eric. She decides to travel from Vancouver to Whale Bay, the coastal town where he makes a living as a fisherman. Eric is married but his wife has been a helpless cripple for years, following a car accident. Juliet arrives in Whale Bay on what turns out to be the day after Eric’s wife’s funeral, and there she stays.
In ‘Soon’, set in 1969, Juliet and Eric are living together, still in Whale Bay. They’re now the parents of a thirteen-month-old daughter, Penelope. Juliet takes the baby on a trip, to Toronto and thence to the small town where she grew up, to visit her parents. Her mother Sara is an invalid. Her father Sam has recently taken early retirement as a schoolteacher and set up a small business growing and selling vegetables. Sam relies heavily, in his new work and in looking after Sara, on a young woman called Irene. Juliet’s time at her parents’ home gives rise to a series of tensions: her unmarried motherhood has scandalised locals who knew her as a girl; she’s disturbed by the nature of her father’s attachment to Irene; when a church minister comes to visit Sara, Juliet gets into a vigorous argument with him about religion. The argument is broken off when the minister suffers a diabetic attack. Once Juliet gets him a sugary drink, he recovers his balance and speech, but not his intellectual poise or his dignity, and takes his leave. Sara makes fumbling attempts to explain her own, recently found faith to Juliet:
‘… it’s something. It’s a – wonderful – something. When it gets really bad for me – when it gets so bad I – you know what I think then? I think, all right. I think – Soon. Soon I’ll see Juliet.’
Juliet makes no reply. Sara dies a few months after the visit. In retrospect, Juliet reproaches herself for uttering no word of reassurance in response to Sara.
As its title suggests, lack of communication between a mother and daughter becomes a central theme of the third Munro story. (Almodóvar planned to call his film Silence: that’s also the title of a forthcoming Martin Scorsese picture, hence the change to Julieta.) At the beginning of ‘Silence’, which takes place nearly twenty years after the events of ‘Soon’, Juliet travels to a place called Denman Island to pick up Penelope, at the end of a six-month spiritual retreat her daughter has been on there. By now, Juliet is something of a celebrity. She works as a journalist and interviewer on a provincial TV channel: en route to Denman Island, she gets into conversation with someone who recognises her from television. When she arrives at the retreat, Juliet learns from the woman who runs it that Penelope is no longer there. Worse, the woman insists she is morally obliged not to tell Juliet anything more about her daughter’s whereabouts. She reminds Juliet reprovingly that Penelope was not raised ‘in a faith-based home’ and that the young woman came to the retreat ‘in great hunger … for the things that were not available to her in her home’.
‘Silence’ moves further backwards and forwards in time than the two preceding stories. We learn that Eric died when his boat sank in a storm. Penelope was thirteen at the time and away at camp; Juliet had been anxious for her daughter to go on this holiday so that she could, in her absence, try to clear the air with Eric. She needs to do this after learning that, during the visit to Juliet’s parents with baby Penelope all those years ago, he resumed sleeping with a woman called Christa, who had satisfied Eric’s sexual needs when his wife no longer could, and who became Juliet’s close friend soon after the latter came to Whale Bay. The bad feeling between Juliet and Eric persists: they have more cross words just before he sets out on his ill-fated fishing trip. The story’s movement forward captures powerfully a recognisable sense of time accelerating, of life becoming increasingly intractable – and pulled out of shape – as a person ages. After Penelope’s disappearance from the retreat, Juliet longs for her to return or at least renew contact. All the daughter does is send her mother an unsigned card each year on Penelope’s birthday. After five years, the cards stop. Juliet stops being a TV personality too; she returns to her classical studies (she never completed the PhD she enrolled for in her early twenties). She still sees and confides in Christa, who now has multiple sclerosis. After Christa’s death, Juliet begins a relationship with Larry, Christa’s brother, which continues but doesn’t develop. One day, she bumps into Penelope’s former schoolfriend, Heather, who has recently bumped into Penelope. Juliet learns from Heather, who clearly knows nothing about the long silence, that Penelope is now the mother of five children. Juliet doesn’t see her daughter again or hear further from her:
‘She keeps on hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.’
This is much more detail about Alice Munro’s stories than might seem reasonable for a film review but I wanted to give a reasonably full sense of what the stories are about before moving on to what Almodóvar has made of them. The above is a synopsis of a plenty of the movie’s plot too. Almodóvar makes various changes but he is, in this sense, largely faithful to Munro. How it is that he ends up far ‘away from her’? Julieta isn’t an instance of a source work being used as no more than a point of departure by a film-maker evidently keen to explore different themes from the original author. It seems, rather, an adaptation that replicates much of the material but makes some adjustments, without realising quite how these alter the meaning of the piece – and diminish it.
The stories contain a motif of Juliet’s failing to say the right thing, at what turns out to be her last chance to do so with the other person concerned. She brusquely rebuffs the unprepossessing passenger who wants to ‘chum around’ for the duration of their train journey. She withholds a platitudinous kind word to her dying mother. She rows with Eric just before he disappears from her life. Although Alice Munro doesn’t make a meal of connecting Juliet’s academic field with the tragic aspect of the three narratives, Juliet’s lack of human sympathy at crucial moments is, in effect, the hamartia – the fatal flaw or error – of the protagonist in Greek tragedy. It’s apt that her fate is to be on the receiving end of a lack of words – from a daughter named, ironically as it turns out, for a heroine of Greek literature who waited faithfully for her loved one’s return. You wouldn’t expect a film-maker to retain the full literary dimension of this and Almodóvar doesn’t – though I’m not sure why he felt the need to rename Penelope as Antía. (Penelope isn’t just a name in common use in modern Spain; it’s also the name of the star of other Almodóvar films, perhaps most notably Volver (2006), whose title translates as ‘to go back or return’.) What’s more surprising is that Almodóvar seems to feel under pressure to resolve things that aren’t fully resolved by Alice Munro: it’s disappointing that he seeks to explain motivation and to tie up loose ends through recourse to movie plot clichés that don’t fit with the Munro material.
Munro’s Juliet is made to feel guilty by Penelope’s spiritual adviser. The latter’s suggestion that her parents’ lack of belief has driven Penelope to seek a different life is given added edge, in the reader’s mind, by the fact that religion has featured, a few pages back in ‘Soon’, as a subject on which Juliet scores a decisive victory, in argument with the hapless minister. Almodóvar cuts that character and the exchange with Juliet’s ailing mother about faith (the film reduces ‘Soon’ to very little screen time) – so that the self-righteous censure of the woman at the retreat comes out of nowhere and has little resonance. Instead, Almodóvar looks to account for Antía’s vanishing on the grounds of her blaming Julieta for her father Xoan’s death in the storm; or blaming herself for not-being-there-for Xoan when he put out to sea; or the nature of her relationship with her schoolfriend Beatriz (the Heather character in Munro) – a relationship so intense that we’re told that Beatriz left Spain for higher education in America, so as to get away from Antía. One of the most striking images in the film occurs when Antía (Priscilla Delgado) and Beatriz (Sara Jiménez) help Julieta from a bath, drape her in towels and start drying her hair. The sequence is memorable chiefly because, when the towel is removed from her head, Adriana Ugarte’s face has become Emma Suárez’s but you can’t help noticing too that, while Julieta is blinded by the towel, the two adolescent girls are smiling conspiratorially. (The slightly older version of Antía is played by Blanca Parés and the Beatriz of some years later by Michelle Jenner.)
After this jumble of usual suspects for explaining melodramatic behaviour, Almodóvar departs sharply from Munro’s resigned melancholic ending. He has Antía write a letter, containing her full address, to Julieta, who immediately goes to seek her daughter out. That’s not all: in the letter, Antía reports that the eldest of her three (instead of the story’s five) children, a nine-year-old boy whom she named for her father Xoan, has recently … drowned. Antía writes that she now knows how her mother must have felt ‘losing’ her. At this point, I started to wonder if Almodóvar was making fun of the clichés he was dredging up. I don’t think he was but this moment supplies a knockdown argument against the idea, promoted by Almodóvar as well as by earnest reviewers of Julieta, that this is his first comedy-free movie. Julieta’s voicing concerns about whether Antía really wants to her see her again is a weak qualification of the mildly upbeat ending that Almodóvar has devised. Although the film ends before the reunion with Antía takes place, the loyally loving Lorenzo (the Larry character from the stories), who accompanies Julieta to her daughter’s address, is easily able to allay these concerns.
The cinema of Almodóvar is steeped in references to other movies and movie types and icons but the effect is very different when these are used to situate or gloss films deriving from his own original screenplays. In Julieta, he’s using conventional film devices – Julieta’s breakdown after Xoan’s death, engaging a private detective to track her daughter down, composing a letter to Antía to tell-you-things-I-could-never-tell-you-because-you-were-only-a-child – as inventions to plug what he seems to think are narrative or psychological gaps in Alice Munro. As a result, the story he tells feels familiar and unchallenging. Something analogous happens – and surprisingly, for a director renowned for flamboyant grotesquerie – with the look of the people in Julieta. The acting is good throughout but several characters – Xoan (Daniel Grao), Julieta’s father’s helpmate (Mariam Bachir), Antía’s spiritual adviser (Nathalie Poza) – are prettier pictures and less troubling personalities than their equivalents in Munro; the effortlessly eccentric Rossy de Palma, as Xoan’s rather sinister housekeeper, is a welcome exception to this tendency in the movie. The relationship between the protagonist’s older and younger selves is one of Julieta‘s more intriguing aspects. The story is told through the face and memories of the older woman. Emma Suárez isn’t an extraordinary camera subject to the extent that many of Almodóvar’s women have been over the years, but she’s a strong naturalistic actress and she gives Julieta a convincingly desiccated appearance. We may know from advance publicity how the title character looked as a young woman but, when the flashbacks to Julieta’s past start up and Adriana Ugarte first appears, she still has a lot of impact: she’s remarkably vivid compared with both Emma Suárez and her own look on the film’s poster, where the contrast between her and Suárez is relatively muted.
For viewers familiar with the short stories, the first appearance of Julieta on the train is all the more startling. Alice Munro’s Juliet is considered ‘not bad-looking for a scholarship girl’ (the reader has the sense this is how others see her and how she therefore sees herself). Adriana Ugarte is emphatically glamorous. No less important, she exudes the sexual self-confidence, and an impression of sexual experience, that Munro’s Juliet lacks – a difference which robs the scenes on the train between Julieta and Xoan (who’s unquestionably experienced, as Eric is in the book) of much of their interest. It’s possible to believe that Munro’s Juliet might grow into Emma Suárez – into someone who isn’t dazzlingly beautiful but whose pleasant looks and increasing sophistication combine to make her very attractive. In realistic terms, it’s impossible to believe that Adriana Ugarte turns into Suárez but I welcomed this impossibility as something more expressive of authentic Almodóvar. The Vanity Fair article suggests that he had from the outset a non-realistic approach to his heroine’s appearance: he intended that Meryl Streep would play Juliet at all ages and without rejuvenating or aging make-up. In the film he’s eventually made, Almodóvar evidently wants to polarise the look of Julieta embarking on adult life and the look of Julieta exhausted by it (even though that’s a gross oversimplification of Alice Munro’s characterisation of Juliet).
The decades-long timeframe of the stories is retained in the film although the first events appear to be taking place in the 1980s rather than the 1960s. Some abiding virtues of Almodóvar remain strongly in evidence, especially the colour combinations in décor and costumes, and realisation of the textures and movement of flesh and fabrics (the cinematography is by Jean-Claude Larrieu). Alberto Iglesias’s music is a characteristic, cunning blend of plaintive and ominous tones. As a visual and sonic composition, Julieta is smooth and beguiling. Plenty of things end up in a rubbish bin – cards, envelopes, the succession of birthday cakes that Julieta buys in the hope of Antía’s homecoming. The first of these cakes is covered in red icing. When it lands in the bin, it reminded me that the film had omitted a significant bit of red waste disposal from ‘Chance’: a complex, upsetting episode in which Juliet, who is having her period, has to use the train toilet urgently and, because the train is stationary thanks to the body on the tracks, can’t flush the toilet. Almodóvar resists his predilection for red imagery in cutting this: it’s the right decision, in the sense that Adriana Ugarte’s self-possessed Julieta wouldn’t have experienced anything of the original Juliet’s menstrual embarrassment.
At other times, Almodóvar seems to be on auto-pilot, indifferent to the implications of what he’s put on screen. In an early scene, as Julieta is packing up her Madrid flat, Lorenzo (Darío Grandinetti) comes in and says, ‘At the moment, you look just like a little girl’ before he’s had chance to get a good sight of her face. Julieta travels to Xoan’s village after her temporary teaching appointment ends and, arriving at his home for the first time, is told bluntly by the housekeeper Marian, ‘The funeral was yesterday’. Given the reason for her impulsive visit, Julieta’s natural first thought would surely be that Marian is talking about Xoan’s funeral; Adriana Ugarte registers neither initial alarm nor subsequent relief, when the housekeeper explains that it’s Xoan’s wife who died. Munro’s Christa has become Ava (Inma Cuesta), a sculptor whose speciality is miniature, stylised male figures with prominent genitalia. At one point, Almodóvar cuts from a shot of Xoan sitting undressed in a chair to one of Ava’s creations, seated in exactly the same attitude. Julieta picks the figure up. In view of the importance in the plot of Xoan’s sexual relationship with Christa and the fact that Julieta knows at an early stage that the pair were lovers before she arrived on the scene, it’s puzzling that she doesn’t appear to connect the sculpture with Xoan – either as a reason for liking it or for being suspicious.
Julieta is a letdown partly because Pedro Almodóvar is a considerable artist; because his failures are more interesting than most, the movie is still very well worth seeing. It hasn’t done great business in Spain, however, and one is bound to wonder how it will fare commercially in the English-speaking world. This month’s Sight & Sound carried an instructive and thought-provoking piece about changes in screen-viewing habits and their economic consequences. The article drew attention to, inter alia, the declining box-office takings of foreign language films in the UK. Almodóvar is one of the very few directors of non-English cinema whose movies are shown here in mainstream as well as arthouse cinemas: Sally and I saw Julieta at Curzon Richmond but it’s on at the Richmond Odeon too. It’s a pity the Odeon feels compelled to advertise the film on their website not simply as Julieta but as ‘Julieta SFL – Subtitled Foreign Language’. The warning comes through loud and clear: are you sure you want to be bothered with listening to all that foreign chatter, with all that tiresome reading?
29 August 2016
[1] http://cameron-tiff.tumblr.com/post/63650393045/alice-munro-writer-of-perfection-so-hard-to-film
[2] For more on this and other aspects of the gestation of Julieta, see the Wikipedia article – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julieta_(film).
