Julieta

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 love Xoan. 

This very modern abstraction of a “primitive” seated male figure 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 under the clay colour finish Ava has cast her human figure in bronze — to protect it from blowing away and breaking.

The first of those two details summarizes the central romantic relationship. When Julieta first meets and makes love to Xoan he has a comatose wife. When Julieta comes to him in his seaside home 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 covered with 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. But 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 embodies the strength that enables individuals and relationships to survive — 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 their 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 father 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 connection of love takes the train —with emptiness as his 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 betrayal 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 signifies 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 kept Antia at camp and took 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 as we learn, Antia’s friendship/love eventually grew so oppressive Bea fled her to America. That’s when Anita retreated from their friendship.

Despite her anger Antia keeps some connection to her mother, sending a fanciful birthday card. 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 realize — by 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.  

Ava’s sculpture — provided by Miquel Navarro — is not the only resonant artwork in the film. The walls and counters abound with pieces that help define the characters. Most are bright, highly coloured works that reflect the characters’ joy in love. But a dense Lucien Freud painting of an emotionally riven man, emphasized in the opening scene, casts its chill across the film. 

Bea’s Madrid mansion has darker, more substantial art commensurate with her family’s wealth and station. When Julieta tells Antia of her father’s death they stand before a large Richard Serra painting: a large inky black pours down upon a threatened white space. It’s an image of the mortality and grief that eventually blows us all away, even if we have the capacity to love that carries us through for a while. Antia burrows into her mother’s arms, crying, then turns for refuge and strength to her new little friend Bea.   

Almodovar manages a brilliant transition from the young Antia and Julieta into the older. Numbed by grief, the widow drifts through the life her daughter takes her to. Antia seems to strengthen as she grows to handle her mother’s profound despair. Antia and Bea lift Julieta out if the bathtub and cover her in towels. As Antia rubs her mother’s hidden head she seems to massage her change from the young, loving Julieta to the grief-stricken shadow of her former self. As there is no face on Ava’s human sculpture, Julieta’s transition under the towel is hidden from us as well. 
     This is as profound and sensitive a film as Almodovar has made. He seems to have reined in some of his stylistic exuberance but lost none of his suggestive powers and emotional engagement with his characters and our life.