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Rating: I love Almodóvar. But above all, I am deeply moved by this man's love for cinema. His boundless and unshakeable faith, his veneration for the film medium, the extreme, spiritual, and physical necessity to create images, to narrate, to film, to tell of the indelible and profound symbiosis between life and cinema. But also for theater. And for anything that is representation in general.
All the cinema of the Spanish director, author, and master is steeped in this urgency, this necessity. In All About My Mother, his most famous and symbolic work, the symbiosis of art/cinema-life is present and made explicit from the very first scene, and from the title itself: a nod to All About Eve (Eva Against Eva). And both before and after the historic film of '99, many other meta-filmic references, Buñuel, Visconti, Rossellini... And this self-nurturing, this citationism, this cinema that is born and develops from cinema, has made him one of the symbolic directors of cinematic post-modernism. In a different and complementary way from other major exponents of this trend, from De Palma to Tarantino.
Almodóvar lives to create images, on stories that he himself writes and produces. Solely and exclusively responsible for every aspect and choice in his works.
Now, faced with what has unanimously, and rightly, been considered his most painful, intimate, and personal work, he has nevertheless done well to emphasize that it is always fiction, and not to take everything that is present in the two hours of screening literally. Pain and Glory is loosely inspired by his life. But, nonetheless, it is a film of disarming sincerity and rawness, showing the crisis of a director who has reached the autumn (as Ozu would define it) of his existence and creativity. The inability to shoot for physical reasons (the back problems Almodóvar actually had) renders life meaningless, it becomes just "life" without more. To this are added depression, addiction to medication, heroin dependence, migraines, the accumulated experience that becomes a source of both pleasure and immense pain. The awareness that one's earthly journey turns to its final phase. And memories, childhood, regrets, melancholy emerge.
Too easy and too simple is the reference to the Fellinian 8 1/2. After all, directors who have created, with due proportions, their own 8 1/2, are countless. Among the many: Allen, Greenaway, Gilliam, Moretti... Simple and immediate comparison even now, indeed. But misleading.
Pain and Glory is not Almodóvar's 8 1/2, but merely the latest film to represent the artistic and vital vision of its author. The craft of filmmaking, the sanctity of the screen, films "to be completed" even many years later, the painful experiences linked to and intertwined with them, the passion, the indissoluble relationship, mentioned above, between life, staging within the film, and beyond the fourth wall, even without ever explicitly breaking it. In The Bad Education, in Broken Embraces, an endless series of these internal and external courses and recourses, to life and the vision of Almodóvar, to the history of cinema.
And now in Pain and Glory, Pedro returns to those grounds creating one of his masterpieces. Revealing only at the end the total absence of Fellinian onirism, but only the continuation of this very personal tight thread. And beyond that, the ghosts of the past, personal and collective, always present. Francoism, never explicitly evoked but never forgotten, poverty, illiteracy, in some cases. The popular and cultural roots of Catholic Spain, (from) always too cumbersome. The relationship of great love, but also contentious and tormented, for the maternal figure, that between a small rural land (sometimes with its related baggage of superstitions and beliefs, as in Volver) and a large metropolis, a "necessary" Madrid, where Pedro was a famous protagonist and singer of the movida of the '80s, a period of cultural and artistic rebirth post-regime. And yet, perhaps, never loved completely.
Often in Almódovar's films, the dual aspect is also recurrent: in this case, however, there is no transformation in the style of The Skin I Live In, but a total identification with his alter-ego Banderas, in the eighth collaboration with friend Almódovar and fresh from a well-deserved Palme d'Or as best actor. Banderas, who even in appearance directly resembles the director and author. In the hair, a bit like it was for Cage in Adaptation, looking like that other genius named Kaufman. For Banderas, it's the most intense and extraordinary performance of his life, and he could not have been anything but the protagonist of this film, he who owes everything to Almodóvar, and whom the latter has called "his Mastroianni".
Pain and Glory is also yet another descent into the depths of desire. The origin of desire in this case. El primer deseo. Desire, in its most varied nuances, to which Almodóvar has dedicated his entire body of work and his distribution house El Deseo, also recalling A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, a play that in All About My Mother was the true hidden protagonist.
All this in the splendid visual and pictorial style characteristic of the Iberian director, with in the foreground, once again, the reds. Red, the color of passion, blood, and desire, precisely. But no sex scenes this time, rather, a restraint to express even more deeply the passage of time and emotions, and the approach to a different intimate dimension.
This is one of the highest and noblest works of Almódovar's maturity, as always so rich in books, paintings, paintings, watercolors, never for mere ostentation but in an extremely functional way to the characters and psychologies of individuals who cannot live without being surrounded by art. Personally, nevertheless, I had already immensely loved that underrated gem that was the previous Julieta. It's just a pity that Iñárritu did not consider rewarding yesterday this true masterpiece at Cannes with the highest honors.
Until the last moment, I was undecided whether to choose this or John Wick 3. Of course, if I had chosen the latter, the third chapter of the delirious saga with Keanu Reeves of which I am a staunch and proud admirer, I would have enjoyed myself more and been less depressed, but I knew Almodóvar gives a lot, and that he leaves something inside you like few others. And so it was, from the wonderful opening titles (fortunately there are still those who make them!)
Long live Almodóvar and John Wick!
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