Almodovar based his Julieta on three short stories from Alice Munro’s 2004 collection Runaway. “Chance,” “Soon” and “Silence” form a sequence centered on part-time Classics teacher Juliet. The stories provide the film’s central plot and central themes.
In “Chance” Juliet has the dramatic train experience, meeting and rejecting the man who then kills himself. She meets the Xaon figure, here Eric, the fisherman with the invalid wife and artist friend Christa. Juliet seeks out his home where she meets the sinister housekeeper. Juliet and Eric fall in love and have a daughter, Penelope. Christa’s art here is painted driftwood, with no single piece presented as closely or as resonantly as Ava’s clay-painted bronze. The story ends on the mention of the women’s “ironic flickering of a submerged rivalry” (p. 86) which will later erupt in both works.
In “Soon” Juliet brings her infant daughter to visit her parents, the invalid Sara and teacher turned gardener Sam, with his useful helper Irene. Almodovar dropped Sam’s and Irene’s respective backstories, as they are outside his present focus. Munro’s Irene leaves Sam before Sara’s death, whereupon he remarries and moves away. Almodovar also dropped the minister’s home visit in which he and Juliet debated faith. The title comes from Sara’s ensuing expression of her personal faith: “When it gets really bad for me…. I think — Soon. Soon I’ll see Juliet” (p. 124). Later Juliet rues her failure to have responded to this outreach. Those omissions suggest Almodovar preferred to examine guilt, remorse and acceptance on the individual, personal level, outside the context of religion.
Munro alludes to a resonant artwork in this story — a print of Chagall’s I and the Village — which Juliet buys because it reminds her of the one her parents had. The work relates to Sam’s decision not to leave his small-minded community and to the spiritual element that infuses even the simplest of everyday life. Almodovar’s Freud painting is the dramatic antithesis.
“Silence” completes the sequence and the film. Juliet is irate at Eric’s betrayal with Christa, which leads to his death in the storm. Munro outlines Penelope’s friendship with Heather — both older than in the film — but not the fervid conclusion Almodovar added, making the daughter more complex in both her needs and her character. He keeps the retreat and her disappearance from Juliet’s life. He makes Juliet’s last lover, Gary/Lorenzo, a far more substantial and passionate man, giving Julieta a fuller life.
Munro leaves her Juliet mildly hoping for some word from her daughter, “as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort” (p. 159). Almodovar provides a happier ending. Julieta gets a card from her daughter with her address, tacitly inviting a visit. But the happy ending is not a cheap overlay. The drowning death of her own son teaches the younger mother to forgive and to accept her own. After 12 years of silence the daughter can’t bring herself to make an explicit invitation. Almodovar’s close is as emotionally and psychologically complex as Munro’s.
* Quotations are from Alice Munro, Runaway (2004; Penguin edition 2005).
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