Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Stars: Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Bárbara Lennie
Bizarrely it took making a film in the English language to finally secure Pedro Almodóvar the Golden Lion at Venice two years ago, but the movie in question – The Room Next Door – felt like a lesser effort from a filmmaker who has been on the run of his career over the last decade or so. Thankfully, returning to his native tongue has allowed a swift course correction and his latest, self-reflexive effort, Bitter Christmas, sits (un)comfortably among that higher tier of late career rompers. ‘Rompers’ may be something of an ill-fit, however, as this one is relatively subdued and defiantly introspective; an openly indulgent act of self-analysis conducted with deprecating brutality. Almodóvar, it seems, is his own worst enemy.
And so we meet his alter ego, writer/director Raúl Durán (Leonardo Sbaraglia), an auteur filmmaker in his own ‘late period’ struggling to finish his latest script, the details of which are torn liberally from a series of dramas in his own life – and the lives of those around him – some two decades prior. Set in 2004, his story (the film-within-the-film) sees him gender-swapped into Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) whois suffering a series of debilitating migraines that her fireman-cum-stripper boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado) can only watch her painfully endure. In a sparkly aside, Elsa is moved to define what it means to be a ‘cult’ filmmaker to one of her attending nurses, wryly alluding that the moniker amounts to that of a failure. “I’m too odd for the industry” Elsa – and by extension Raúl and then Almodóvar – jokes.
Bitter Christmas opens in extreme close-up on a pixelated flip=phone image of two people standing in front of a monument, an image later brought into context at a pivotal moment for Elsa. Our first encounter of this image is so disorienting as to render it miasmic blobs of patterned colour, before a slow zoom out brings it into coherence. Almodóvar’s film almost works in the opposite direction, starting out at a discombobulated, almost confused distance before gradually and then uncomfortably zeroing in on the director’s (serious?) litany of grievances with himself. Almodóvar spikily reflects on his own selfishness and insensitivity in mining the experiences of those around him for dramatic purposes, while simultaneously Bitter Christmas staunchly defends the practice, acting as it’s own Exhibit A of the artistic merits of such expression to reach emotional truths.
As one ought to expect by now, his fingerprints are all over this thing in recognisable ways. The chic design choices, the immaculate furnishings, the proliferation of deep reds and verdant greens, Rossy De Palma (yay). Already working with a redolently indulgent subject (himself), Almodóvar gives himself permission to detour into some of his most desirous sequences this decade. Bonifacio’s simulatory orgasmic strip show evidences this filmmaker’s continuing, enduring eroticism, while two key sequences in the first half hang on beautiful, intimate singing performances that suspend the picture in some moodily crimson bubble. One live and in person, one on record, both as captivating as each other.
The mid-section, in which Else decamps to a balmy villa to work on her own screenplay and is joined by her depressive friend Natalia (Milena Smit), does see the movie meander a little, but with purpose… as oxymoronic as that sounds. It’s all in service of a wickedly written third act, which worms back through the layers to Raúl’s ethically questionable process as he comes to blows with his former assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), who feels emotionally plundered by his recent creative decisions inspired by her own tragedy. Much of Bitter Christmas is characters talking to one another, and Almodóvar outdoes himself, particularly when these two lock heads at an outdoor café as the sun goes down. Mónica’s most juicy put-down is to tell Raúl that “Netflix has been waiting for you for a while”. The last refuge of the past-it auteur.
There are questions within all this that clearly continue to trouble Almodóvar. How long does mourning last, seems to be the primary. Through his own screenplay he seems to chide himself for writing once more about his mothers’ death, but he’s evidently in a privileged position to exorcise these emotions on such a luxurious canvas. Bitter Christmas is the work of an emotionally available artist trying to project ineffable and sometimes haunting feelings outward. The methodology is exemplary. There’s some career-spanning self-analysis at work, particularly in the duality of this filmmaker’s approach to women, who often receive his most ravishing, multi-dimensional parts, but who are often cruelly tortured by the mechanics of his movies. A love/hate relationship that’s extended to some of Almodóvar’s clumsier public choices. As much as Pain & Glory turned the camera back toward the filmmaker, Bitter Christmas feels like a more biting self-examination. Fortunately, the immaculate presentation, engaging writing and soul stirring music from mainstay Alberto Iglesias turn this into a richly rewarding act of refraction.
The Lost Highway Hotel 