PLOT: An aging auteur finds inspiration from his closest friends while writing his first film in five years.
REVIEW: When you get to the level of someone like Pedro Almodóvar, who’s seemingly won every film award known to man and is celebrated as one of the greatest icons of world cinema, how do you keep the momentum going? Many of his contemporaries have faded away or chased their former glory, but Almodóvar keeps things fresh. His movies don’t always work, and it’s been a while since his last real classic (some would say 2019’s Pain and Glory, others would say 2011’s The Skin I Live In or 2006’s Volver), but his work is always interesting — not only for its artistic merit, but for what it says about his own view of himself as an artist.
It’s impossible not to read into his latest, Bitter Christmas, with his on-screen surrogate, Leonardo Sbaraglia’s Raul, having been deliberately stylized to resemble the director. It finds Raul plugging away at a story that’s seemingly going nowhere as he deals with a personal blow — his lifelong assistant and confidante, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón’s Monica, has left his employ to deal with a family tragedy. Soon, the details of what she’s going through make their way into Raul’s new screenplay, which is set to be his comeback after half a decade of inactivity.
Bitter Christmas is similar to two other Cannes films I’ve seen this year, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and Parallel Tales, in that a large portion of the running time is dedicated to a dramatization of the work the main character is creating. In fact, the majority of Bitter Christmas is dedicated to the film within the film, with Raul’s script doppelgänger being a much younger woman, Bárbara Lennie’s Elsa, who is another director inspired by the misfortunes of her friends.
The film within the film certainly feels like minor Almodóvar, with it being a soapy story of Elsa as she tries to exploit the tragedies of two of her friends for material. One is her associate Patricia (Victoria Luengo), whose husband is having an affair. But when that doesn’t pan out — either on the page or in real life — she turns her attention to a model she once worked with, Milena Smit’s Natalia, whose child died and has left her in a precarious state ripe for drama.
In the “real world” sequences, we see how Elsa’s life mirrors Raul’s own, with her increasingly detached from her much younger beau, a doting full-time firefighter and part-time stripper named Bo (Patrick Criado), just as Raul himself is looked after by his younger partner, Quim Gutiérrez’s Santi. It’s quite melodramatic, with Almodóvar clearly riffing on one of his great influences, Douglas Sirk. The heightened melodrama feels deliberate, but remember — we’re watching a film within a film, and it’s not “supposed” to be great.
When Bitter Christmas really starts to gel — and it honestly takes about 80% of the running time to get there — is during a bravura finale where Raul is finally confronted with the truth about his career. In this sequence, Almodóvar seems to savagely tear apart his own recent work, with Monica reminding Raul that his major achievements are behind him and encouraging him to make a short movie for streaming — just as Pedro himself recently did with Strange Way of Life. While I’d agree that the majority of Bitter Christmas is indeed minor work (albeit gorgeous, with the attractive cast all wearing Prada and Pau Esteve Birba’s lensing immaculate), the finale is genuinely powerful.
While definitely one of his non-essential works, this final stretch of the film is more than enough to make Bitter Christmasa worthwhile addition to his canon, as it’s rare for a director to be so openly self-critical, even while refusing to live solely off past laurels. I hope he keeps striving for greatness, because there’s enough here to suggest he’s still more than capable of it.
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