Back to the Future: Recalcitrance and Fidelity in Julieta

Abstract

Pedro Almodóvar’s adaptation of three Alice Munro short stories – ‘Chance’, ‘Soon’ and ‘Silence’, which appear consecutively and as episodes in one character’s life in the collection Runaway (2006) – was a much-anticipated project. Not only has Almodóvar noted frequently his great admiration of Munro’s work, but the planned film (provisionally entitled Silence) was to be the director’s first English language feature, and the first of his films to be set and shot outside of Spain – i.e. in Canada, the setting of the stories. The disappointment, then, was palpable when the director returned to Spain announcing that the project, in Canada at least, was off. Ignominy was then added to discomfort when, shortly before the Spanish release of Julieta, Almodóvar and his brother Agustín were embroiled in a tax scandal – leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm revealed that El Deseo (founded by the brothers) had set up an offshore company in the early 1990s (Romney 2016b).