ABSTRACT
This paper, by bringing together under close scrutiny three short stories (“Chance”, “Soon”, and “Silence”, written by Alice Munro) and the film that they inspired Pedro Almodóvar with, aims to show that what is at stake is much more than the question of adaptation and its possible (un)faithfulness. Exiling these Canadian texts away from their aesthetic (and gendered?) means to transform them into a European movie, with its own specific frame of references (Basque country, Catholicism, etc.), the Spanish director has paved the way for a transcultural reflection of a nature that triggers ‘belated’ and destabilizing afterthoughts on Transmodernity grounded on a fusion of the intimate and the universal. Because it remains strangely close to the spirit of the short stories without ever renouncing an original Mediterranean inspiration, Julieta allows itself to go beyond North American particularities without ever denying them, to reach, through the inscription of the figure of the double and an expert manipulation of time, a paradoxically present re-presentation of absence. Such considerations are informed by the Freudian theory of trauma (most notably Nachträglichkeit), and by the more recent works of French psychoanalyst, Pierre Fedida.
