Film review

  • Whistle Down the Wind

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bryan Forbes (1961)

    Alan Barnes is remarkable in Whistle Down the Wind partly because this seven-year-old boy often seems like a little old man – both in his face and in the crotchety, sceptical attitudes of Charles Bostock, the character he plays.  That alone made this BFI screening of Whistle Down the Wind an intriguing prospect.  The screening, under the ‘Projecting the Archive’ banner, opened a season of films to commemorate Bryan Forbes’ centenary and marked the publication of a Whistle Down the Wind volume in the BFI Film Classics book series.  At the end of the film, curator Josephine Botting, author of the Film Classics book, was joined for a Q&A on the NFT1 stage by the three Bostock children of yesteryear:  the film’s star Hayley Mills, Diane Poole (née Holgate) and Alan Barnes – all of them actual senior citizens now.

    This was the first cinema film directed by Bryan Forbes.  Fourteen more would follow, but this debut feature was one of his most successful pictures and it’s the best Forbes film that I’ve seen.  He and Richard Attenborough bought the screen rights to Whistle Down the Wind, Mary Hayley Bell’s recently published novel(la), soon after becoming partners in the production company Allied Film Makers, in 1959.  If Wikipedia is right, Mary Hayley Bell and her husband, John Mills, were reluctant to have Forbes write or direct the film adaptation.  Attenborough, who produced it, brought in Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall to write the screenplay and Guy Green to direct; when Green dropped out at short notice, Attenborough persuaded the Millses to think again about letting Forbes direct.  Waterhouse and Hall turned Whistle Down the Wind into something far removed – socially and geographically – from Hayley Bell’s book.  The main three children in the story were based on the author’s own; the Mills family, who lived on Richmond Hill in Surrey, owned a farm in Sussex, where they spent summer holidays and which inspired the novel’s setting.  The film takes place in the Lancashire countryside, with Burnley and Clitheroe the nearest towns.  Kathy, Nan and Charles Bostock live with their widowed farmer father (Bernard Lee) and his diligent, querulous sister Dorothy (Elsie Wagstaff), who has kept house for her brother and helped look after the children since their mother died.  Forbes doesn’t overdo the hardscrabble atmosphere, but you get the strong impression that the family isn’t well off, and that local children generally have little scope for widening their horizons.

    The core of Mary Hayley Bell’s story, though, remains the same.  The eldest of the three children is startled to find a strange man hiding in a barn at the farm.  He’s startled too, by her, and, when asked who he is, involuntarily mutters ‘Jesus Christ …’.  The girl takes his words literally.  Over the next few days, she, her sister and brother, and other children they know, come to the barn with food and an assortment of other things for the man, who in fact is on the run from the police.  In the book, he’s an escaped convict; in the film, he’s Arthur Alan Blakey (Alan Bates), suspected of murder.  Forbes’ narrative basically mirrors the life of Christ, from his birth in a Bethlehem stable, adored by shepherds and the Magi, to his arrest by the authorities:  as Blakey gives himself up to the police and stands outside the barn to be frisked, his arms are held in a crucifix position.  Despite the manhunt gathering pace in the area and even ‘Wanted’ posters, showing Blakey’s face, in a nearby village, the children are unaware of the man’s real identity.  They keep Jesus a secret from the adults until Nan, inadvertently, and Charles, more ambivalently, give the game away to their father at Charles’ birthday party, which turns out to be a kind of Last Supper.

    Discussing with her three guests the location shoot in rural Lancashire in the early months of 1961, Jo Botting referred to the film’s story as ‘the Christmas story’.  You knew what she meant but that label is slightly misleading – never mind where Blakey is holed up and, when Kathy’s siblings first see him there, ‘asleep on the hay’; that the children bring gifts to the barn; that one of Forbes’ most memorable images is of Kathy, Nan and Charles capering – on a hillside, around a leafless tree – to the accompaniment of Malcolm Arnold’s sprightly instrumental arrangement of ‘We Three Kings’.  It may well be winter, but the story doesn’t take place at or approaching Christmastime – if it did, there’d surely be more excited anticipation in the air.  Yet the children aren’t in school either (you’re more aware of that because they are seen in Sunday school, and because Charles and some other boys wear school caps).  Why not?  It could be the February half-term holiday; it’s perhaps more likely that the script doesn’t bother to mention something that Mary Hayley Bell does.  In the book ‘the children’s school was closed’ because of ‘a scare involving the police’ (Wikipedia).

    Waterhouse and Hall’s adaptation is all the more impressive for not placing the events too close to Christmas but instead creating a jumble of Christian lore and influences to fill the children’s heads.  A Salvation Army woman (Patricia Heneghan) reassures Charles, trying to find a home for one of the farm cat’s kittens which the Bostock children have just saved from being drowned, that he can be sure Jesus will look after the kitten.  The Sunday school teacher, Miss Lodge (Diane Clare), leads a discussion, prompted by Kathy’s question, about how Jesus Christ might be treated on return to the world today.  When Kathy and Nan are gathering provisions for the man in the barn, they take bread from the breakfast table and ‘a bottle of wine’ (it turns out to be port) from a dining room cupboard; Nan asks if they don’t also need fish to go with the bread.  The miracle of the loaves and fishes is mentioned again when the larger group of kids urge Jesus to tell them a story; the Good Samaritan (which they’ve learned about with Miss Lodge) and ‘the ‘oly Ghost’ are other suggestions.

    In the wrong hands, this religious allegory could be hard to take, but Forbes handles it admirably.  His film is full of feeling, yet rarely sentimental, and the script is rich in deflating, humorous detail that keeps the story in the real, contemporary world, but is often touching too, and doesn’t diminish the tale’s emotional power.  When the Sunday school teacher asks what Jesus would find different today, the answers are, ‘telly … Wagon Train …‘Beat the Clock’ … Cup final’.  Nan brings to the barn a girls’ comic, ‘Shirley’; she explains to Blakey that ‘It’s got a free gift inside – an Arabian charm bracelet’.  Another child gives him a New Testament, adding ‘your book’ when he looks puzzled.  Succumbing hastily to the noisy pleas for a story, Blakey opts for the comic rather than the gospels, and awkwardly reads the tale of ‘Ruth Lawrence, Air Hostess’:  because of who they think he is, his audience still listens with rapt reverence.

    Charles’ gift is the black kitten, Spider, but Jesus fails to do what the Salvationist promised, and Spider dies on his watch.  (The Bostock children defy their father in rescuing the kittens at the start – they hide the litter in the barn before Blakey becomes a bigger secret there.)  Trying to console her brother, Kathy seeks out the local vicar (Hamilton Dyce), and asks why Jesus has allowed the kitten, or indeed allows anything, to die.  The vicar’s uneasy theodicy fails to convince Charles who, as he and Kathy exit, says bluntly, ‘He doesn’t know, does he?’  While this is very funny, the loss of the kitten is a serious turning point in the narrative.  Once Spider dies, doubts creep into Charles’ mind that the unexpected barn guest isn’t Jesus at all.  He confirms this at his party, after Nan has blurted out that a second piece of birthday cake she’s taken is for Jesus, and the children’s father asks what she means.   ‘He’s not Jesus,’ says Charles, ‘he’s just a fella’.

    Although I’ve not read the book and this may be unfair to Mary Hayley Bell, it’s hard to believe the film’s comic qualities derive from the presumably middle-class and certainly home counties world of her original.  Wikipedia’s synopsis of the novel also suggests a conclusion far more pious (and melodramatic) than the film’s – ‘… the Man [sic] set the barn and the oast house on fire and escaped.  The children’s father shows [his three children] … a cross left behind on a wall still standing after the blaze and they assure him that the whole affair has not changed how they felt about Jesus’.  Forbes and his writers are comparatively subtle and sparing.  Two children arrive on the scene after Jesus/Blakey has been arrested and driven away.  ‘Has he gone?’, they ask Kathy, who replies, ‘Yes, you missed him this time, but he’ll be coming again’.  The film does preserve what I’m guessing is the book’s enchanted-world-of-childhood theme, but without compromising its own harsher context and realistic dialogue.  At the same time, Forbes resists crude dismissal of the adult world as disenchanted and hypocritical.  He also brings out well how the children’s view of Christ blurs any distinction between miracle working and magic tricks.  (It’s a coincidence that, in recent weeks, I’ve watched or re-watched a succession of films premised on the importance of seeing the world as a child – Mary Poppins (1964), Field of Dreams (1989), ET (1982), now this one.)

    I knew that when Whistle Down the Wind was made, John Mills and Mary Hayley Bell’s younger daughter Hayley (five years Juliet’s junior) was a big name in Britain and Hollywood.  I didn’t know, until it was mentioned in the introduction to this screening, that Hayley Mills’ box-office clout was what secured the funding Forbes and Attenborough needed to get the film made.  Mills was fourteen at the time; although not tall for her age, she towers over nearly all the other children and seems a bit too mature for Kathy (whose equivalent is twelve in the novel).  As an already experienced screen performer, though, Mills holds things together well and – this is quite an achievement – doesn’t seem incongruous among the children sharing the screen with her.  These were all kids at local schools in and around Burnley and Clitheroe; none had prior experience of appearing on camera.  Hayley Mills isn’t as instinctively expressive as the pair playing her sister and brother, but she’s professional enough to convey her character’s feelings reliably well.  It’s because we see it through Kathy’s eyes that that crucifixion pose in the closing stages doesn’t stick out as too explicitly meaningful.

    Stalwart British character actors of the era, like Bernard Lee and Norman Bird, as a shifty farm hand, are on good form – Lee’s Bostock is gruff and easily irritated, but you keep seeing, and feeling, the farmer’s love for his children, and anxiety to protect them.  But Whistle Down the Wind is memorable chiefly for the youngsters.  Alan Barnes is the outstanding OAP-in-waiting, but ten-year-old Diane Holgate’s face also seems to anticipate the older woman that Nan will be – the same goes for some of the other kids’ faces.  The impression you get that these futures are predetermined by childhood circumstances is reinforced by clothes (which I guess were mostly the kids’ own clothes) that make them seem old beyond their years.

    There’s just one adult nearly as terrific as any of the children – another Alan B.  The first-rate acting in the previous year’s The Entertainer included a quietly effective portrait of Archie Rice’s son Frank from Alan Bates.  That was Bates’ cinema debut.  In Whistle Down the Wind, only his second film – in a role that, while obviously vital to the story, doesn’t involve a huge amount of screen time or many lines to speak – he gives what would be one of the most completely satisfying performances of his screen career.  In the barn he is, with the help of Arthur Ibbetson’s lighting, an exceptional camera subject.  Bates’ dark, bright eyes and swarthy good looks combine to give him a quality of danger and of nobility:  he’s credible as both the man he really is and as the transcendent figure the children see.  His eyes express Blakey’s initial bafflement followed by growing realisation of what’s going on with the children.  The reticence of Arthur Alan Blakey, wanted for questioning about a murder in Derby, makes perfect sense, of course, but Alan Arthur Bates, born and raised in Derby, is eloquent when he does speak, and shows real comic skill in Blakey’s uncomfortable reading of the ‘Shirley’ story.

    Bryan Forbes’ widow, Nanette Newman, still looking and sounding good at the age of ninety-two, made an unbilled appearance to say a few words about Whistle Down the Wind from the front row of NFT1.  Hayley Mills, eighty now, made her way onto the stage with the help of a walking stick; as their characters did in the film, Diane Poole and Alan Barnes followed.  Jo Botting opened the Q&A by saying that she understood this was the first time the threesome had ever shared a stage together, and Hayley Mills confirmed as much.  You soon got the feeling this was maybe the first time she’d spoken to either of the other two since the film wrapped, sixty-five years ago this spring.  Mills was very eager to ask the questions (to be fair, she did keep apologising to polite Jo Botting for doing so).  Why hadn’t her co-stars continued to act?   In fact, Alan Barnes did do one more film – he had a small part in The Victors (1963), a Carl Foreman World War II drama – but he and Diane Poole clearly never entertained the idea of an acting career; they were sure their parents would have taken a dim view of that.  (Roy Holder, who has the fourth largest kid’s role, was unusual among the children in the film in that he went on to act for a living, and successfully.)  The duo had very happy memories of making Whistle Down the Wind but soon seem to have accepted the experience as a thrilling one-off.  Both still live in the same part of Lancashire where they grew up.  It’s nice to report that Alan Barnes in his early seventies is far from the grumpy old man that Charles Bostock seemed to foreshadow.

    The Q&A yielded plenty of brilliant insights and anecdotes, with a strong times-change flavour, about the making of the film.  Diane Poole recalled how the headmaster of the primary school where she and Alan Barnes were pupils, told school assembly one morning, ‘Now two men are going to be watching you in the playground today, but don’t take any notice of them’!  The two men were Richard Attenborough and Bryan Forbes at the start of the casting process.  Later, when Diane and Alan were on the final short list to play Nan and Charles, Attenborough gave each of them a lift home (in his Bentley or Daimler – there was some dispute as to which).  Attenborough asked Alan, ‘Now, would you like to be in a film?’   It’s thought that the answer – ‘I’m not bothered’ – may well have clinched him the role.  Diane recalls that when Richard Attenborough brought her back home, her mother was mortified that he should visit on a day when she hadn’t donkey-stoned the doorstep.  Hayley Mills was alone among the children in learning the script.  It increases your admiration for Bryan Forbes’ direction to know that, with the other children, Forbes usually told each of them what to say and how to say it just before shooting a sequence.  Most sequences were done in a single take.  A painful exception, for Alan Barnes, came in the scene where Elsie Wagstaff’s Auntie Dorothy smacks Charles’ head.  That required ten takes.

    Whistle Down the Wind isn’t perfect.  Some of the adult cast tend to be a bit wooden.  Although it makes for a powerful image, the swarm of children that gather to witness Jesus’ arrest is too big – a biblical multitude that rather violates the prevailing naturalism.  All in all, though, the film is very good.  As well as the story and the people in it, there’s Arthur Ibbetson’s black-and-white cinematography, which captures the bleak landscape most successfully, and Malcolm Arnold’s inventive original score.  Allied Film Makers, the brainchild of Sydney Box, was short-lived.  One of its last films was Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), written and directed by Bryan Forbes and co-starring Richard Attenborough.  The company isn’t as well remembered as Woodfall Films, which started around the same time and lasted considerably longer.  Under Tony Richardson’s leadership, Woodfall produced some of the most celebrated films of the ‘British New Wave’, several of them directed by Richardson himself – Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Tom Jones (1963).  But none of them beats Whistle Down the Wind.

    4 September 2026

  • Bitter Christmas

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Amarga Navidad

    Pedro Almodóvar  (2026)

    Fortyish Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) has a terrible migraine that’s getting worse.  The first few scenes of Bitter Christmas, set in December 2004, describe her visit, accompanied by her younger boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), to a Madrid hospital’s A&E department.  It’s not long before the screen announces ‘2025’ and shows a grey-haired man working on his laptop:  Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is writing a script in which Elsa is the main character.  Over the course of the next 100 minutes or so, Pedro Almodóvar’s narrative moves back and forth between the lives of Elsa and the man creating her.  In the closing stages, Almodóvar makes as clear as can be that Raúl is his own alter ego – although much of the audience will already have twigged that.  The confirmation that we’ve been watching autofiction arrives much too late to redeem a film that’s mostly bland, even banal.  In stressing how awful it is to be an internationally renowned, much-honoured auteur, now getting old and with his best work behind him, Almodóvar succeeds only in underlining the self-commiseration that shapes Bitter Christmas.

    Elsa is, like Raúl, a filmmaker – or used to be.  Neither of her films was a success though they’ve developed something of a cult following; she now makes her living directing commercials.  One of Elsa’s films was shot partly in the hospital where the opening scenes of Bitter Christmas take place, and Dr García (Carmen Machi), who treats Elsa there and diagnoses a panic attack in conjunction with the migraine, recognises her.  The location shooting in the hospital also explains Elsa’s firm insistence on now staying in one room rather than another on the same ward – she wants to avoid the room in which one of her characters died.  Dr García feels that she’s seen Bonifacio before, too.  He thinks not until Elsa asks if the doctor has been to any hen parties lately, and the answer is yes:  Bonifacio’s a firefighter who moonlights as a stripper – stage name Beau – at weekends.  When she’s discharged from hospital and they return home, Elsa recalls how she first met Bonifacio, a year ago, when he was performing at a club.  He next accepted an offer to appear in an underwear commercial she was soon to shoot then started sharing her bed and apartment.  Once she’s had this flashback, Elsa still feels ill and calls her friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo), who, as well as putting Elsa in touch with a psychiatrist, tells her where she can get hold of the best medication for panic attacks.  Elsa and Bonifacio turn up at a party hosted by Gabriela (Rossy de Palma), who supplies the tablets that Elsa needs.  She still has a bad head and goes to rest in a bedroom, amid the pile of party guests’ coats.  She’s woken by Amaia Romero (as herself), who sits next to Elsa to deliver a Chavela Vargas song, rather loudly.  This seems the last thing a migraine sufferer needs though we’re probably not meant to think that’s why the song moves Elsa to tears.

    In 2025, Raúl tells his personal assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) that his screenplay – for a film called ‘Bitter Christmas’ – draws on his own experience of a panic attack in 2004.  Also acknowledging that his screen fiction often draws on reality, Raúl announces a central theme of Bitter Christmas.  Mónica, apparently coincidentally, tells him she wants an immediate sabbatical, but doesn’t at first say why, simply informing him that Santi (Quim Gutiérrez), who is Raúl’s live-in boyfriend and domestic factotum, will be able to deal with everything in her absence.  (As with Elsa and Bonifacio, there’s a big age difference between Raúl and Santi.)  Raúl wheedles out of Mónica, just before she goes on leave, that she’s going to care for a friend called Elena, whose son has cancer.  Mónica also takes this opportunity to advise Raúl to get a life outside filmmaking.  She is barely out of the door before Raúl goes back to his screenplay, writing that Elsa receives a phone call from her friend Elena.  He then quickly changes the name Elena to Natalia.  Back in 2004, Elsa takes a call from Natalia (Milena Smit), whose young son was killed in a road accident two years previously.

    It will be clear how Bitter Christmas basically works; the set-up is elaborated by Elsa’s deciding that she too must write another film.  In a session with the psychiatrist (María Morales), she explains that she learned of her mother’s death while shooting the pants advert with Bonifacio.  The psychiatrist suggests that Elsa go on vacation to process her bereavement; she heads for a villa in Lanzarote with Patricia and her little boy, Lorenzo (Nico Martín).  Patricia is now reeling from the discovery that her husband has been unfaithful.  The holiday doesn’t do much for her self-esteem when she finds out that Elsa’s script is about two grieving women friends, one with an adulterous husband, on an island not unlike Lanzarote.  Once Patricia has angrily headed back to Madrid with Lorenzo, Elsa recalls her last meeting with her mother (Gloria Muñoz) then invites Natalia to take Patricia’s place in the villa.  The still grief-stricken Natalia attempts suicide on Lanzarote but Elsa gets her to a hospital in time to save her.  When Natalia comes round, the conversation between the two women echoes Elsa’s final conversation with her late mother.

    It goes almost without saying that Raúl has learned in the meantime from Mónica that her friend’s son has died and that Elena has tried but failed to take her own life.  Once Mónica reads Raúl’s script, she’s furious, and demands he remove Natalia from the story.  She accuses Raúl of refusing to accept his filmmaking career is in irreversible decline, of exploiting other people’s tragedies in the absence of any original ideas, of treating Santi shabbily.  It now emerges that the two men’s relationship began on a weekend in … 2004.  Shocked by Mónica’s outburst, Raúl tells her that he should have sought inspiration instead from the more than two decades that she has worked with him.  It seems meant to be an act of contrition that he changes his screenplay’s title from ‘Amarga Navidad’ to ‘Dulce Elsa’, the eponymous heroine to be based not on himself but on Mónica.  Santi, who already knows from Raúl that he inspired the character of Elsa’s boyfriend, is curious about what happens to Bonifacio in the revised screenplay.  Raúl replies that he doesn’t yet know himself but needs to be left alone to write.  Santi uncomplainingly gets the message.  Raúl returns to his laptop.

    Involved as the narrative is, its layering doesn’t enrich Bitter Christmas.  Those of us familiar with his recent work not only will understand from the start what Almodóvar is up to, but may well also wonder why he is, in effect, repeating himself, after Pain and Glory (2019).  It’s true that the latter, rather than critiquing a writer-director’s life and art, moved more simply between an ageing filmmaker’s past and present, but the results were far more rewarding.  It isn’t naturally easy for a film to dramatise the art of writing.  Almodóvar’s solution is to over-rely on what has become a cinema cliché – the writer-as-parasite, using the private lives and traumas of people they know as creative fodder.  Woody Allen was doing this decades ago, as one strand of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and as the main premise of Deconstructing Harry (1997).  Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (2016) and Josephine Decker’s Shirley (2020) are among more recent examples.  Just last year, Joachim Trier used the same idea in Sentimental Value.  The structure of Bitter Christmas is also reminiscent of the Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman collaboration Adaptation (2002); unlike that film, though, there’s no dramatic or comic traction between the writer’s story and the story that he’s in the throes of writing.

    The opening scenes of Bitter Christmas are baffling at first.  Your immediate reaction to Elsa’s hospital visit is to think (a) that Bárbara Lennie isn’t a migraine sufferer (unlike Almodóvar, by all accounts), (b) that Madrid citizens in 2004 enjoyed an exceptional quality of public healthcare.  Elsa checks in wearing dark glasses and unsmiling but doesn’t seem fragile (later, when she’s told to lie back slowly in bed, Lennie lies back rather quickly).  The A&E waiting room is almost deserted, and Elsa is seen without delay.  The medic (Antonio Romero) who first sees her administers strong painkillers; as soon as Elsa says (again, without delay) that these aren’t working, she’s kept in for the night and receives further treatment.  Yet the male doctor has also apologised that, due to the public holiday and all, the hospital is very busy.  Is Almodóvar trying to be unconvincing?  Once it’s clear that Elsa is a character in Raúl’s script-in-progress, you think that perhaps he is – and is meaning to convey this is how the business of writing happens:  discard the first draft, move on to the next one …  Even if this is what Almodóvar intends, it doesn’t work.   We don’t see Raúl’s improved versions of parts of Elsa’s story (not that we’d want to) – only the next stage of that story, which is often as implausible as that opening hospital episode.  (I won’t trouble giving examples of what doesn’t make sense in later episodes.)  And none of this justifies Bárbara Lennie’s weak acting:  Elsa’s panic attacks are no more persuasive than her migraines.

    As in The Room Next Door (2004), the best things in Bitter Christmas are incidentals.  The woman at the hospital reception desk whose next customers, after Elsa has checked in, are a young male couple with bloodied faces; the receptionist scolds them for not wiping cocaine traces from the credit card they hand her as ID.  Dr García, with her good memory for faces and poor understanding of what a ‘cult’ film is.  Beau/Bonifacio’s flamboyantly erotic striptease for a hen party.  What these bits have in common – and what makes them rain in the desert of Bitter Christmas – is humour.  Also as with The Room Next Door, you’re increasingly aware that it’s a bit sad to be so cheered by the décor and clothes – vividly patterned curtains in Elsa’s holiday villa, how the different-coloured tops worn by characters sharing a scene complement each other – just because more substantial elements are unsatisfying.  Alberto Iglesias’ music is as melodic and sensitive as ever yet has no connection with the uninvolving story it’s trying to serve.  Shortly before her suicide attempt, Natalia, while Elsa is taking a phone call, catches the eye of a young boy sitting at a nearby table in a restaurant.  He keeps smiling at her, then laughing; the more the boy engages with her, the worse it is for Natalia.  This is just about the only moment emotionally strong enough for the narrative to acquire – but so briefly – a dramatic life of its own.  Although it goes without saying that an Almodóvar film looks good, memorable images here are few (this isn’t meant as a criticism of the cinematographer, Pau Esteve Birba, working with Almodóvar for the first time).  The visual highlights are mostly on Lanzarote:  a far overhead shot of Elsa and Patricia side by side on the beach, with the tide coming in; Elsa and Natalia walking through an extraordinary landscape of vineyards that Natalia mistakes for graves.  (According to Google AI, in Lanzarote’s ‘unique volcanic wine region … vines are planted in deep, semi-circular hollows dug out of thick layers of black volcanic ash, surrounded by stone walls to protect them from the wind’.)

    Mention of graves calls to mind Parallel Mothers (2021), Almodóvar’s most overtly political film to date.  The Room Next Door, which came next, could be seen as a contribution to debates about assisted suicide and featured a (long) monologue about global warming.  On paper, Bitter Christmas seems to represent a welcome reversion to more familiar personal themes on Almodóvar’s part.  But as with his near-contemporary Steven Spielberg’s recent Disclosure Day – a return to his suspenseful sci-fi comfort zone after a few years of genre-hopping – the result is more than disappointing.  In an interview with IndieWire in October 2024 (when The Room Next Door had just premiered), Almodóvar described Bitter Christmas, presumably in the works at the time, as a ‘tragic comedy about gender’.  The film he’s made hardly ever feels tragic, is rarely comic and seems to say remarkably little about gender – except that you keep wondering whether it might have been more dynamic if the character of Elsa had been a man.

    Although Bárbara Lennie is inadequate, it must be said that Elsa is anyway a remote conception – the unfinished alter ego of a character who’s nothing more than Almodóvar’s representative on screen (the Antonio Banderas character in Pain and Glory was much more than that).  Lennie comes off particularly badly because she has the largest role.  There’s nothing like a 50-50 division of screen time between the two parts of Bitter Christmas – until that eleventh-hour foregrounding of Raúl/Almodóvar’s creative plight, the Elsa story dominates.  And Raúl is less in evidence than Elsa because his character is so under-developed:  Leonardo Sbaraglia, who gave a beautiful performance in his small but key role in Pain and Glory, is wasted here.  There’s not much to Mónica either, though Aitana Sánchez-Gijón’s zest energises her scenes.  Mónica’s lesser criticisms of Raúl’s ‘Bitter Christmas’ screenplay include that Bonifacio just disappears from the story – a disappointment for Bitter Christmas viewers too because Patrick Criado makes Bonifacio more interesting than the toy boy/sex object conception might suggest, even if his exertions at the hen party are the highlight.  Quim Gutiérrez, excellent in Robin Campillo’s Red Island (2023), is surprisingly cast but effective as Raúl’s placid lover and dogsbody.  Gutiérrez suggests, and holds in tension, Santi’s recognition of his calcified, somewhat demeaning domestic life, and his affection for Raúl.  The unmistakable Rossy de Palma is only on screen for a couple of minutes, but you’re grateful for them.

    A major weakness of Bitter Christmas is that the Raúl part of the narrative is no sharper than the desultory Elsa part and has no more credibility – even though it wouldn’t take much to inject a modicum of reality.  For example, when Mónica tells Raúl she’s taking leave, he might at least take issue with her perfunctory assurance that Santi will be able to take over her job – might tell her that, if she believes that, Mónica really must think Raúl’s on the way out as a sought-after cultural celebrity.  And Monica, during their climactic showdown about his declining powers, might at least console Raúl that his filmmaking reputation is such that most of the press will continue to praise his work even if it’s not much cop nowadays.  That’s certainly what seems to be happening with Bitter Christmas – 90% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes (from 59 critics’ reviews so far).  Almodóvar is highly aware of what he’s doing, of course, and probably realises that a big chunk of his audience shares his awareness.  Although that makes him more honest about his writing than Elsa or Raúl, it doesn’t make it easier to sympathise with his woe-is-me-ism.  Perhaps it’s just as well that he’s getting mostly good notices.  The thought that Pedro Almodóvar might take disparagement of Bitter Christmas as proving his supposedly tragic point would be even more dismaying than the film itself is.

    1 September 2026

     

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