‘Julieta’ finds a new tone for ‘that ultimate touch’ of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar

A woman dries her hair with a towel. Who emerges from underneath that towel is the same woman, but many years later and now played by a different actress. That elegant act of transformation, an evocative vision of the ways in which we change over time but also in many ways stay the same, is the centerpiece of Pedro Almodóvar’s “Julieta.”

The film marks something new from the veteran Spanish filmmaker, a two-time Oscar winner who has been a pillar of the international festival and art-house scene since he emerged in the 1980s with provocative films such as “Dark Habits” and “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”

Though Almodóvar is known largely for his riotously overheated melodramas and recent excursions into genre deconstruction, “Julieta” is an adaptation of three short stories by the Canadian author Alice Munro and a sincere, straightforward drama, minus the air of self-conscious referentiality that comes with the “melo” prefix.

“For a baroque director such as myself I have actually deprived myself of many of the gestures I would have deployed in some of my others films,” Almodóvar, 67, said during a recent interview in Los Angeles. “And this restraint is how I have made ‘Julieta’ an austere drama. Now it doesn’t matter if other people don’t experience it as an austere drama, what matters for me is that’s what it is.

“It’s much easier for me to make a melodrama. I feel much more comfortable. But it was a very good experience to be dry,” he added. “You can make something different for yourself and it is really welcome. I would like to make always things I have never done in the past.”

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In the film actresses Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte both play the title character. As the movie begins, Suárez plays Julieta as a woman estranged from her adult daughter Antía but desperate to reconnect. Then in flashback, Ugarte plays Julieta when she was younger, as the story explains the complicated past that led to their estrangement, and then leaps forward to find her still struggling to reconcile with Antía.

The film was submitted as Spain’s official entry for the foreign-language Academy Award but surprisingly failed to make the shortlist of nine titles competing for the final five nominations. It was likewise not nominated for the foreign-language Golden Globe, a prize Almodóvar has won twice before.

The film has nevertheless been playing since late last month in Los Angeles and continues to open around the country. An ongoing Almodóvar retrospective at L.A’s Cinefamily has been drawing sellout crowds, building toward a screening of “Julieta” on the 22nd.

Though the changes in “Julieta” could be read as ongoing signs of maturity on the part of Almodóvar and his skillfully assured sense of storytelling, the film feels fresh, not autumnal or like a more typical artist’s later work.

“I was very surprised when I read ‘Julieta,’ because I saw that it was really a drama and not a melodrama,” said actress Rossy de Palma, who first worked with Almodóvar on his 1987 film “Law of Desire” and returns with a supporting role in the new film. “I’m surprised that Pedro held onto all his preoccupations, held onto his universe and made it much more minimalist. And I love that: the restraint of including only the essential things.”

In conversation Almodóvar is exuberant and charming, switching between English and Spanish. He retains a film-lover’s hunger for new movies, asking where a few recent releases he wanted to catch up on might be playing.

He noted that the central image of one woman going under a towel and emerging as an older version of herself had been with him from the screenplay’s very first draft.

“When I speak of simplicity, that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about, trying to avoid any complex visual rhetoric,” he said. “It’s a moment that on the one hand is very human, just two people drying a feminine body, but there’s also something of an element of religiosity in that moment.”

As references of overall tone and performance for his actresses, he referred them to Joan Didion’s book “The Year of Magical Thinking” as an examination of loss and grief, the iconic actress Jeanne Moreau for her walk and the way she held the screen, as well as the recent German film “Phoenix” starring Nina Hoss. Almodóvar noted that he wrote the film listening to the abstract music of composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but was at first reluctant to share it with the actresses.

For Ugarte, a television star in Spain, the chance to work with Almodóvar was genuinely a childhood dream come true. During an interview in Los Angeles alongside De Palma, Ugarte recalled how she once saw Almodóvar out at the movies in Madrid when she was young girl who then only harbored fantasies of being an actress.

Almodóvar purposefully did not want Ugarte and Suárez to see each other performing, as he worked with them separately; they only overlapped on set for one day. For Ugarte, finally seeing how her costar approached the same role was a shock for all the subtle shadings of continuity.

“When I saw all the film, I realized we were just one,” Ugarte said. “I didn’t miss myself when it was Emma and she said the same thing. It felt like one part. It was like magic. Maybe Pedro brought us to the same way to understand how Julieta suffers.”

Almodóvar has long had an interest in not only Munro’s work — a copy of the short-story collection “Runaway” can be seen on a bookshelf in his 2011 film “The Skin I Live In” — but also the possibility of finally making an English-language film. “There is one moment in every decade where I decide to try, ‘Let’s make my first movie in English,’” Almodóvar said.

At one point it was reported that Almodóvar was going to adapt the Munro stories in English, set in New York with a cast that would include Meryl Streep. But as has happened before, Almodóvar got cold feet and temporarily shelved the project before refashioning it to take place in Spain.

Even with the somber, reflective tone of “Julieta” already staking out new territory for him, Almodóvar wondered aloud what would be gained, or lost, if he were to work in English, his own creative curiosity taking hold.

“The difference would be in the way I behave during the shooting,” said Almodóvar. “I usually change many things at the last minute. I’m also the writer of the movie and I don’t have to ask anybody. I invent new lines when we are rehearsing and at the last minute in front of the camera. And this is something I’m afraid I will miss, that ultimate touch is very important in my movies.

“I’d be curious to see if I could do it in English and have that chance to intervene in the last moment as I always do,” he added. “I’d be curious to see what kind of movie I would make. Because surely it would be a different kind of movie, but I’d also to be interested to see what it might be.”

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Mark.Olsen@latimes.com

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