Lovers on the run: Let’s dance

 

  French choreographer Benjamin Millepied makes his directorial debut by enrolling in the lovers-on-the-run school of filmmaking. We’ve raced through these corridors before, but not quite like this.

  Loosely following the arc of Bizet's opera, Millepied's Carmen casts Melissa Barrera (In the Heights) as a fiercely independent woman who escapes cartel killers in Mexico and takes flight to Los Angeles.

  During a skirmish at the border, Barrera's Carmen meets Aidan (Paul Mescal of Aftersun), a former Marine who did two tours in Afghanistan. To protect Carmen, Aidan kills a border patrol officer. 

   The two take flight.

   A plot summary doesn't do justice to Millepied's effort. Relying heavily on cinematographer Jorge Widmer (A Tree of Life and V for Vendetta) and composer Nicholas Britell (Moonlight), Millepied turns his movie into a dreamy succession of set pieces, many featuring dance and song.

   Other musical contributions come from singer/songwriters Julieta Venegas, songwriter Taura Stinson, and rapper The D.O.C.

   The movie's opening sets a no-nonsense mood. Flamenco dancer Marina Tamayo dances on a wooden platform in the middle of a lonely arid landscape. The rhythms she creates with her feet are sharply defiant. Whatever these men want, Tamayo's character has no intention of giving it to them.

    Tamayo, who's playing Carmen's mother, dies at the hands of these cartel thugs, but her presence is meant to haunt the rest of the film.

   Millepied requires his actors to create a strong presence as much as to develop their characters. Mescal makes a convincing battle-scarred warrior with a tender side and Barrera shines during the dance sequences. 

   Pedro Amodovar regular Rossy de Palma brings her striking appearance to the film as the owner of a club where Aidan and Carmen find respite. De Palma's witchy blend of concern, menace, and eroticism almost turn her into a special effect.

   Border issues and the traumatic impact of war add topicality but Millepied seems to be aiming for more than a gloss on current events, possibly a story about characters who become dramatic archetypes.

   As a result, emotions often play second fiddle to Millepied's  formalized approach, a prospect that will bother those expecting torrid passion. 

   Carmen may not deliver on every level, but bold execution creates appreciation for a movie of artistic ambition and palpable daring.

Almodovar's look at mothers and history

 

   For much of his career, director Pedro Almodovar has devoted himself to a pleasure-filled aesthetic. Almodovar's Parallel Mothers doesn’t entirely abandon the director's love of splash colors. Almodovar's characters typically arrive on screen drenched in decor and design. The women in his movies seldom appear ordinary.

  Of course, there’s another side to this coin. Does the emphasis on exteriors cloak what’s on the inside of all those characters? Is Almodovar playing a sly game with us?

  Living in Spain, Almodovar must know that his country’s leap into post-Franco modernism carried risks, even as it brought gender fluidity, sexual expression, and bold artistic expression.

  The joys of liberation threaten to obscure a brutal past in which dissent and dissenters were not tolerated.

  That's the troubling foundation on which Almodovar allows Parallel Mothers to unfold, focusing his story on a successful photographer (Penelope Cruz) who's trying to settle a debt with the past.

   In her work. Cruz's Janis meets Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a forensic archaeologist. She wants Arturo to help excavate a site which the folks in her hometown have identified as the location of a mass murder. Janis's great grandfather was among those slain by fascist soldiers.

   As the story evolves, the personal and the political prove inseparable. Janis sleeps with Arturo, becomes pregnant, and opts to keep the baby. The married Arturo isn’t ready to leave his ailing wife. Janis seems intent on being a single mother.

   Almodovar sketches all this quickly before settling into the main part of the movie, which deals with Janis’ relationship with another young mother (Milena Smit), this one still a teenager.

    The two women meet when both are in labor and sharing a room at a Madrid hospital. 

     Almodovar opts for a contrivance (I won’t reveal it here) that easily could have sunk his movie, pushing it toward cliche. Instead, he shows us how the two women are drawn together as they face troubling questions, some  hinging on generational differences.

     Still a young woman, Smit’s Ana is less attuned to recent Spanish history than Janis. She’s a kid and she’s given a nearly impish look that’s reinforced by Smit’s performance.

     Additional characters appear. Almodovar veteran Rossy de Palma portrays Janis’s editor, a woman who hires Janis for glossy photoshoots. Ana’s mother (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), an actress, seems too preoccupied with her career to fully acknowledge her daughter.

    Cruz’s performance holds the movie together. Cruz has talked about the intuitive connection she has with Almodovar.  Since 1977, she has made seven films with Almodovar, including Volver (2006) and All About My Mother (1999).

   I don’t know if Cruz is romanticizing her relationship with Almodovar but her work here is first-rate. She’s playing a character burdened with her own issues while fulfilling a cultural responsibility, an obligation to the past.

    At a key point in the movie, Janis also must make a crucial decision about her own relationship to the truth.

    By the movie's end, Almodovar has reminded us of a lesson that goes beyond Spain, the Spanish Civil War, and totalitarianism. We must dig up the past before we can put it to rest. We owe it to the dead and to ourselves.

An isolated woman deals with loss

Director Pedro Almodovar blends stories by author Alice Munro and makes them his own.

Pedro Almodvar, the fine and often cheeky Spanish director of movies such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, The Skin I Live In and Talk to Her, always has been as much interior designer as movie director. In an Almodovar movie, everything from hair styles to wall paper take on evocative meaning.

Of course, all filmmakers pay attention to such details, but with Almodovar the icing and the cake often carry equal weight.

Beyond that, Almodovar's fluid camera creates a cinematic richness that's difficult to resist -- even when the director isn't working at peak form, as probably is the case in Almodovar's latest, Julieta.

Loosely basing his movie on several stories by Canadian author Alice Munro, Almodovar focuses on the title character at two distinct stages of her life: as a young teacher (Adriana Ugarte) and as a middle-aged woman (Emma Suarez).

We meet the older version of Julieta as she's about to leave Spain for Portugal with a grateful and admiring lover (Dario Grandinetti). But Suarez's Julieta backs out at the last minute, deciding to remain in Madrid. She leaves her upscale apartment, and moves into an building she occupied when her now-grown daughter was a teen-ager.

The story then introduces us to the younger Julieta, a woman whose life changes when she meets a young fisherman named Xoan (Daniel Grao) on a train. Julieta and Xoan have an affair; she becomes pregnant. Julieta moves to a small seaside town to be with Xoan.

Xoan's housekeeper (Rossy de Palma) doesn't take to Julieta, but she's totally attached to Xoan and, then, to Julieta's child, Antia. We also meet Ava (Inma Cuesta), a sculptress who was one of Xoan's lovers -- and, on occasion, still may be.

Julieta's daughter becomes the source of the middle-aged Julieta's torment as Almodovar creates a massive generational gulf. Neither mother nor daughter can deal with tragedy, and both are mired in recrimination.

Young Antia vanishes, after participating in a mountain retreat. She hasn't been in touch with her mother in more than a decade. When Julieta settles into her depressing new digs, she begins to write letters to the daughter with whom she's lost touch. These letters serve to explain why Julieta now lives in isolation.

As much as any director, Almodovar loves the movie image, and that love often redeems his movies. In the case of Julieta, the director has found material that takes him to a familiar place: the trials of a woman who responds to a chance meeting that turns into ... well ... a life.