From his breakout screwball comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) to his late-career melodramas of strong-willed protagonists, Almodóvar’s films find humor and beauty in female hardship. With Julieta, he’s centered an entire movie on a woman’s loss: The eponymous character is first unable to move on after her husband dies in a boating accident and later has to cope by herself when her only daughter leaves their shared home unexpectedly. Spanning several decades, the film marries Munro’s keen attention to the quiet lives certain women lead with Almodóvar’s flamboyant style. Moments of still reflection in Munro’s words become beautifully art-directed scenes that look like stylish tableaux vivants.
Writing for the feminist online magazine Píkara, the Spanish critic and author María Castejón Leorza negatively reviewed Julieta, arguing that in its stylized depiction of suffering, it contributed to what has become Almodóvar’s signature sensibility: the glamorization of pathos and victimhood. To her, this is an element that merely repurposes the latent misogyny of Spain’s patriarchal society. Castejón Leorza’s complaint against Almodóvar is not a new one. Already in 1992, for example, the film critic Caryn James had written a scathing appraisal of the director in The New York Times. Arguing that his films can leave a bitter aftertaste, James posited that while he creates strong women characters, he “then takes away their strength; there is a definite trace of misogyny lurking beneath his apparently fond creations of women.” [...]
The intersection between gay male culture and melodramatic femininity is at the heart of Almodóvar’s 1999 film All About My Mother. It earned the director some of the best reviews of his career—as Armond White wrote in his New York Press review of the film, the director’s “gay male identification with women frees him to do his best work.” The Oscar-winning movie is centered on a young queer artist, Esteban, whose death sets the plot in motion. It is Esteban’s fascination with cinema that opens the film (he’s watching the Bette Davis classic All About Eve with his mother) and his diva adoration that leads to his untimely death (he’s struck by a car while trying to get an autograph from the actress playing Blanche DuBois in a Spanish theatre production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire). The film may not have been as explicitly autobiographical as Almodóvar’s later Bad Education (2004), but it nonetheless corralled many of his most famous themes and images—he even borrowed an organ-donor conversation at a hospital following Esteban’s death from his earlier film The Flower of My Secret (1995).
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