Review: "Julieta"

Oh, Pedro Almodóvar and his women.

Is there another male filmmaker, American or foreign, whose career has been so dedicated to exploring complex, nuanced female characters? The Spanish master’s oeuvre is filled with stories of mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, sisters and mistresses. Men are nearly always in the background of his films.

“Julieta” is a minor work in Almodóvar’s filmography, but still a worthy one. It explores how a woman’s history of loss changes her from a dynamic young independent spirit into a middle-aged person bound by regret -- but still filled with a resolve to seek out love wherever she can find it.

Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte play Julieta at older and younger stages, respectively. It’s a testament to their skills that we feel the continuity of a single life despite any lack of resemblance in face or voice.

As the story opens, Julieta is preparing to move from Madrid to Portugal with her boyfriend, Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti). It seems an ideal situation for the longtime widow, a pleasant ramp down to fulfilling golden years.

But then she runs into a friend of her daughter, Antia, whom she has not heard from in years. She used to receive blank cards on her birthdays, but now not even that. The friend tells her that her child is living in Switzerland with three children of her own -- grandkids she never even knew existed.

Abruptly, Julieta cancels the move with Lorenzo, knowing it will doom the relationship. She even moves back into the old apartment she had while raising Antia -- clinging to the desperate hope that her daughter will come home to her again.

Ugarte takes over the role as the story shifts to an extended flashback. We meet Antia’s father, Xoan (Daniel Grao), whom Julieta met on a train. A tragedy brings them closer together, and they begin an affair even though Xoan is still married, to a woman in a coma. Sadness clings to Xoan like dew to a flower, but she can’t resist his presence.

Things go on from there with typical Almodóvar story twists involving affairs, tragic accidents and misunderstandings that grow into yawning chasms of emotional separation. As usual, the filmmaker also penned the script.

“Julieta” is a rather low-key movie, without the usual epic tides of emotion we’re used to from the Spanish filmmaker. But that’s by design, I think. He’s exploring how someone reacts when the people most dear to them are suddenly ripped away -- by circumstance, and by another’s seemingly cruel choice. It’s a quiet tempest.

Video review: "The Skin I Live In"

The sort of psycho-sexual thriller that Alfred Hitchcock only wishes he could've made in his era, "The Skin I Live In" is the best film in a decade by the Spanish auteur, Pedro Almodóvar.

This wild, kinky story is about an obsessive plastic surgeon named Robert (Antonio Banderas) who has a woman cooped up in his country mansion. Wearing only a nude skin-tight bodysuit, Vera (Elena Anaya) is a walking enigma, observed through a barrage of video cameras.

Is she Robert's lover? His prisoner? His patient? Perhaps, somehow, all three?

Vera is anguished, having just attempted suicide as the story opens, but the strange new skin Robert has grafted onto her is nearly impervious to her knife slashes. Things get even stranger when a malevolent interloper invades their sanctuary, and makes lascivious overtures toward Vera.

This story is intercut with flashbacks to a few years ago when Robert and his teen daughter struggled to come to grips with the self-inflicted death of his wife. It's a thorny bramble of a story, leading the audience into temptation and chaos even as we draw closer to the answers to the film's mysteries.

What a weird, wondrous journey.

Extra features, which are the same for Blu-ray and DVD versions, are decent enough without being transformative.

The highlight is a collection of seven making-of featurettes that come together to give an extensive behind-the-scenes peek at the filmmakers' process. True, a feature-length commentary track would've been better. But coupled with a video Q&A with Almodóvar, viewers can get a pretty good insight into the Spaniard's creative process.

There is also an "On the Red Carpet" featurette at the movie's New York premiere.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 3 stars

Review: "The Skin I Live In"

If Alfred Hitchcock were making movies in 2011 instead of mid-20th century, he might very well have concocted something like "The Skin I Live In." It's a stylish sexual thriller that takes much of Hitchcock's obsessive voyeurism toward the female form and dials it up to 11. Think "Vertigo," and layer on a whole lot of kinky, fetishistic behavior.

It's a highly disturbing film, and wonderfully so.

Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar -- one of the few filmmakers today who deserves that description -- delivers one of his most original and nightmarish visions. Based on a novel by Thierry Jonquet, it wears the clothes of a mystery/thriller, but like most of Almodóvar's movies the outer layer is just dressing for deeper and darker themes rumbling underneath.

The story opens with a wealthy and driven plastic surgeon, Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), who has a woman locked up in a room of his remote mansion. Is she his prisoner? A patient? A caged bird he desires for himself? Perhaps all of these?

Known only as Vera, the woman (Elena Anaya) wears a strange, skin-tight bodysuit that hugs every inch of her body in a cocoon that is both protective and confining -- even her fingers and toes are tightly encased.
Vera is obviously unhappy: Robert returns home to find her having attempted to slash her wrists and chest. Curiously, she has been very unsuccessful in damaging herself. We soon learn that Robert has spent years perfecting a new replacement for human skin that is resistant to burns and cuts.

Because he achieved this miracle through transgenesis -- combining human and pig skin cells -- his work is forbidden and, therefore, kept strictly secret. His only confidant is his servant Marilia (Marisa Paredes), who has been with the family for decades and is privy to, or part of, all of the Ledgard secrets.

Things really get strange when a man named Zeca wearing a tiger costume for Carnival shows up on the doorstep, and eyes Vera with an animalistic lust.

Clues are dropped like so many bread crumbs in the forest -- are they leading the audience to the answer, or luring us further into a bramble of temptation and madness? Either way, the journey is delectable.

The action suddenly switches to years earlier. Robert's wife, horribly burned in a car accident, kills herself in front of their daughter, Norma. Later, at a wedding party Norma will meet Vicente (Janet Cornet), a charming young rake whose actions will set them all on the path to tragedy.

I cannot say more for fear of ruining the filmgoer's experience. Suffice it to say that all I have described is mere prologue.

Almodóvar, known for pushing boundaries, blows past many of them with this daring vision. Anaya spends almost the entire movie either nude or in that odd bodysuit, and at one point during her transformation wears a translucent mask with a cross-like cutout for her eyes and mouth, too.

The director and his cinematographer, José Luis Alcaine, shoot with bold close-ups and crisp images, so sharply defined it seems everything is lit up like an operating theater. But with splashes of warm color, the feel is anything but sterile -- the visuals are vibrant and breathtaking.

The film's only weakness is that the main character remains something of a cipher. But then, at some point we come to question who exactly is the protagonist.

"The Skin I Live In" is a wonderfully twisted cinematic expedition into territory rarely traveled.

3.5 stars out of four

Review: "Broken Embraces"

Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish auteur who loves to play around with film genres, takes a stab at film noir in his newest, "Broken Embraces" -- with a little flavor of Federico Fellini's "8½" thrown in for good measure.

It's the story of a filmmaker (Lluis Homar), blind and lonely, who goes by the name Harry Caine. His name used to be Mateo Blanco, before he lost his sight and the love of his life, played by Penelope Cruz. (Both names, incidentally, are writing aliases Almodovar has himself used.)

Harry/Mateo is content to lead a quiet life writing movie scripts, with the help of his longtime friend Judit (Blanca Portilla) and her son Diego (Tamar Novas). Then he gets a visit from a slimy fellow calling himself Ray X (Ruben Ochandiano) who wants Harry to write a screenplay for him to direct.

This sets off a shifting timeline in which the Harry of today attempts to puzzle out the mystery of what happened to Mateo 14 years ago.

It turns out Ray X is really the son of a wealthy businessman, Ernesto Martel (Jose Luis Gomez), who financed Harry/Mateo's film back in the 1990s starring Ernesto's mistress, Lena (Cruz).

Mateo and Lena soon became lovers, which prompted the jealous financier to have his son videotape all the behind-the-scenes action -- ostensibly for a documentary about the making of the film, but really to spy on his mistress.

Writer/director Almodovar weaves together the intersecting storylines of the characters, both past and present, in a sort of murder/mystery potboiler.

Homar and Cruz are a scorching-hot film couple. Unlike most such portrayals of filmmakers and their muse, he is not an egotistical narcissist and she is not a dimwitted twit easily manipulated.

Similarly, the portrayal of her businessman sugar daddy is not a black-and-white depiction of evil. Ernesto helped her ailing father get proper medical treatment, and seems to generally care about her well-being -- a bit too much, as it were.

A few aspects of the plot are puzzling. For example, why Ray X seeks out Harry/Mateo after so many years. And the film plays around with the notion that the writer's blindness is a ruse, but then just drops the idea.

"Broken Embraces" isn't among Almodovar's finest work, but it's a diverting jaunt through familiar cinematic tropes, as well as the filmmaker's distinctive psyche.

3 stars