By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Julieta
and Personal Shopper
Julieta
Pedro Almodóvar, directing his 21st feature, is again riding a feminine carousel. Julieta has Julieta doubled. The very attractive, middle-aging woman of Madrid is played with subtle verve of nerves by Emma Suárez. In her written (and flashbacked) memories her younger self is played by Adriana Ugarte as a sensitive blond bombshell who loves the Greek classics. Ugarte is probably the Spanish master’s best wow since Penélope Cruz. And then there is Julieta’s daughter Antia, played as child and teen by several engaging girls. And the flinty housekeeper acted by Rossy de Palma, Pedro’s Gothic gargoyle of Spanish pride (no man of La Mancha can stand against her).
Once
again, los hombres are harem accessories.
Pedro, famously gay, displays the buff appeal of Daniel Grao as Xoan, the stud fisherman
(hints of Ulysses) who fathered Antia. On the side Xoan pleasures Ava (Inma
Cuesta), a strong, sexy sculptress of Greco-macho nudes. Gentlemanly Lorenzo
(Dario Grandinetti) comforts the mature, often depressed Julieta. In el mundo de Pedro the males are on hand mainly
to pay attention, cast some seed and pick up broken crockery. It’s the females,
singly, in pairs, in triads, in generations, who cause and inhabit the Iberian weather
of feelings. Soap opera? If so, closer to opera than soap.
Almodóvar
compacted three short stories of Alice Munro, now Hispanicized (it was once
planned in English for Meryl Streep). In this seamless narrative people still
write letters and notes, and emotions find the flamenco cadence of Castilian
speech. The axis, of course, is Julieta, who surrenders her teaching dream for
motherhood. Her idyll is upended not only by Xoan but willful daughter Antia. No
point in spelling this out, though “spoilers” mean little when a director makes
each scene pregnant from the last, giving birth to the next. Hurt and guilt
become Julieta’s new, Homeric sea, churned less by Catholicism than tides of
desire and fidelity, though there is a holy trinity moment of young Julieta
with her baby and her aging mother.
Buffs
will relish the surrealism of a stag, running alongside a train, and doesn’t a
suicidal passenger echo Luis Buñuel’s great actor Fernando Rey? In a Hitchcock overlay,
the stars playing Julieta recall the two sides of Kim Novak in Vertigo, with Ugarte looking a lot like Novak’s
“Madeleine.” Rich stuff, but less strategic than Almodóver’s fluency of moods
and décor-in-depth (emphasis on red, blue and yellow). The crucial role of
Antia could have used more development, but Julieta
is Julieta. Having dreamed of ancient Greeks, she finds herself in a Spanish life suspended
between tragedy and melodrama, consecrated to the compulsions of Pedro. In a
word: Viva!
Personal Shopper
Kristen
Stewart made a smart jump away from the Twilight
Saga movies by playing a personal assistant in Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). It is less
smart to go from the artistic to the arty, as Stewart and Assayas have done
with Personal Shopper. The slender,
elegant actress plays Maureen, the American scootering round Paris as “personal
shopper” of clothing and jewelry for a celebrity fashion totem, a woman of
almost Trumpean shallowness. Maureen is told to never wear the garments. Of
course she does, covertly. On this flimsy hanger, Assayas suspends two vapid attempts
at mystery.
The
vaguely psychic Maureen sleuths the ghost of her twin brother, which leads to a
spooky old house where (she notes) a phantom “vomits ectoplasm.” And Maureen is
stalked by a man, often through creepy texting, which leads to a grisly murder
(not hers). The pieces scarcely connect, unless you wish to be pious about
auteurist intentions. Even when you thicken the gravy with Stewart half-nude (twice),
a Victor Hugo séance, and Marlene Dietrich singing in Angst Deutsch, you’re still stuck with a meatloaf of murk. It took
the mise-en-scène prize at Cannes,
which means the elegant gravy can’t save the under-cooked meat.
SALAD (A List)
The Ten Best Almodóver Movies (with stars and year): Volver (con Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, 2006), All About My Mother (con Marisa Paredes, Cecilia Roth, Penélope Cruz, 1999), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (con Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, Rossy de Palma, 1988), Talk to Her (con Javier Cámara, Roserio Flores, 2002), Julieta (con Emma Suárez, Adriana Ugarte, Daniel Grao, 2016), Broken Embraces (con Penélope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Blanca Portillo, 2009), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (con Victoria Abril, Antonio Banderas, 1990). Live Flesh (con Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Liberto Rabal, 1997), Law of Desire (con Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, 1987) and Kika (con Verónica Forqué, Peter Coyote, Victoria Abril, 1993).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Citizen
Welles tried to diet his grand bulk in later years, but the gourmand in him was
never silent. As when, lunching, he extolled the kiwi: “It’s the greatest fruit
in the universe! But it’s ruined by all the French chefs who cut it up into
thin slices. You cannot tell what it tastes like unless you eat it in bulk.
Then it is marvelous, and it has the highest vitamin content of any fruit in
the world.” (Orson Welles to Henry Jaglom, My
Lunches With Orson.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
While
not a flop, The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre was not the big 1948 hit its later
legend implied: “Women largely ruled the box office and Treasure lacked wide appeal. Males mostly took it as an odd, exotic
Western (swell bandits, not enough horses and gunplay). Ballyhoo included
theater managers staging ‘treasure hunts’ for tickets, with fake gold bars on
display under armed guard. One puff shot showed Bogart talking into the ear of
a burro. Fortunately, the film was spared its ‘love song’ by Dick Manning and
Buddy Kaye: ‘For you are the treasure of
Sierra Madre / And your love is the
gold that I tenderly hold’.” (From the Humphrey Bogart / Treasure of the Sierra Madre chapter in
my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in
Movies, yours from Amazon, Nook or Kindle).
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Raimunda
(Penélope Cruz) faces another colorful crisis in Volver (El Deseo/ Sony Pictures Classics, 2006; director Pedro
Almodóver, cinematographer Ester García).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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