Whose Life Is it?
Pedro Almodóvar is in a reflective mood again, and that’s fine. But it makes us miss wacky Pedro.
Bitter Christmas
Director: Pedro Almodóvar • Writer: Pedro Almodóvar
Starring: Bárbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Quim Gutiérrez, Patrick Criado
Spain • 1hr 51mins
Opens Hong Kong September 17 • III
Grade: B
Pedro Almodóvar’s latest clinic in colour-blocking, Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad), is an oddity for arguably the filmmaker who best “gets” women even though he’s a man. In the wake of 2019’s brutally honest Pain and Glory, in which a film director played by OG Almodóvar avatar Antonio Banderas reflects on his life and his art, Almodóvar is at it again, picking at the creative process and, kind of, deconstructing his own life. There’s nothing anywhere in official materials that says Bitter Christmas is semi- or autobiographical. But it’s hard not to read it as such considering how personal his body of work overall is, that Almodóvar’s now pushing 80 (!), has made made over 40 films and had about a million retrospectives of his work.
Predicated on a memory/flashback and a low-key film-within-a-film construct, the story unfolds starting roughly 20 years ago, with director Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) being whisked off to the A&E by her boyfriend, firefighter and stripper (it’s Almodóvar, it works) Bonifacio (Patrick Criado). We learn a little about her blazing start as a director, which frittered out into regular work shooting underwear ads. Two friends are crucial to Elsa’s life: Patricia (Victoria Luengo), who’s married to a serial cheater and Natalia (Milena Smit), a model who dropped out of the business due to a personal tragedy. But it turns out Elsa is a character in a script acclaimed but ageing director Raúl (Pain and Glory’s Leonardo Sbaraglia) is writing in an attempt to get his artistic mojo back and make one last film. And worse, a great deal of Elsa is based on his tireless, long-time assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) and when she finally reads the finished script she’s pissed. Patricia and Natalia are real, and she tells Raúl he has no right to pilfer from her life like that – which he does up to that very moment.
Anyone but Almodóvar?
Depending on your mood, the film-within-a-film will either be clever sleight of hand – Raúl is writing a fiction based on someone else’s real memories – or simply wilful obfuscation. And even Almodóvar stans may find there’s one too many twist inside a memory wrapped in script pages; too many of the major players are never clearly delineated, eliciting one too many “Who’s that?” moments as the story clips along. But there’s no denying the precision of the filmmaking (aside from the colour) and the nakedness of the material. The threads cleverly connecting the past and the present, real people with those from Raúl’s imagination run the gamut from graceful to uncomfortable, though we’re never quite sure who should feel uncomfortable: us, Raúl, Mónica? There’s also something almost confessional about Bitter Christmas that sits in opposition to Pain and Glory’s reflection, something that makes Raúl hard to respect. He’s unapologetic about mining Mónica’s life, throwing out every excuse imaginable to justify his invasion of her privacy, and despite modelling Bonifacio on his partner Santi (Quim Gutiérrez), Raúl’s in-story treatment of Bonifacio makes it pretty clear how much importance he actually places on his relationship with Santi. But he also makes valid arguments about the origins of art. As the saying goes, “Write what you know.” The question in Bitter Christmas is whether or not Raúl knows what he’s writing. Does Almodóvar?
As compelling as all that sounds – and there’s way, way more going on – and as typically gorgeous as it all looks, Bitter Christmas is Almodóvar at his most considered, and so it’s not nearly as acidly funny, unconventionally sexy and sexual, or narratively ludicrous as he’s been in the past. It’s fine, and fans will want to add it to the library, but that’s all; it’s not as wrong in the right way, or confronting as it should be for Almodóvar. That’s not to say mature Almodóvar isn’t compulsively watchable: The Skin I Live In, Parallel Mothers, Volver and Talk to Her are among his best. But in his younger days, Bonifacio would have been 1) Banderas and 2) a more aggressively outré character, the absurdity of his dual jobs played for maximum weirdness and far more nudity, and Mónica would have burnt Raúl’s life to the ground in the most melodramatic way possible and it would have been glorious. Judging from the contemplative tone of his last few films – The Room Next Door also touched on creativity, legacy and what’s left behind – Almodóvar has his life’s work on his mind, and there’s no reason he should be thinking otherwise; he doesn’t have to make crazy Matador every time. But tossing the inimitable Rossy de Palma in for a cameo reminds us of that past Almodóvar, and when the current one is merely fine it makes you want to mine your own memories.