‘Julieta’ Review: A Subdued Pedro Almodovar Is Still Weird Enough

Almodóvar 20th film, “Julieta,” is inspired by three short stories from the Alice Munro book “Runaway.”

[...] perhaps surprisingly, it didn’t really fit with this year’s lurid Cannes titles like “Slack Bay,” “The Handmaiden,” “Staying Vertical” and “American Honey” — by comparison with those films, Almodóvar has relinquished his role as the prince of transgression to get downright decorous.

The movie and the characters are haunted by loss, but the film is floats on reminiscence and reverie; Alberto Iglesias’ music, jazzy and noir in a very Bernard Hermann-doing-Hitchcock way, tells us that things important and mysterious are taking place, but Almodóvar sticks to hints and allusions, not answers.

With its focus on a couple of female characters, the film is something of a return to the “cinema of women” that produced such Almodóvar classics as “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “All About My Mother,” but in a lower key.

From the opening shot of a red curtain that turns out to be a woman’s blouse, there’s hardly a scene without a splash of vivid red in it; a couple of times a character describes the surroundings as “a real mess,” but Almodóvar creates impeccable messes in which memories dwell.

Though he’s been making movies since 1980, Almodóvar is a recent Cannes regular. 1999’s “All About My Mother” was the first of his films to premiere at the festival, followed by “Bad Education” in 2004, “Volver” in 2006, “Broken Embraces” in 2009 and “The Skin I Live In” in 2011; the last four were in the Cannes main competition.