Film review

Dolor y gloria

Pedro Almodóvar (2019)

Pain and Glory is the best film of the year so far and Almodóvar’s best film in many years, his finest work since Talk to Her (2002).   After a series of exciting pictures during the first two decades of his career, his more recent work has, without losing its way, lost its singular momentum.  Declining energy, a manifestation of his last movie Julieta (2016), has become the central theme of this new one and the effect is transformative.  Pain and Glory probes the psychosomatics of the solitude and creative stasis of the protagonist Salvador Mallo, an internationally famous Spanish film director.  As if that wasn’t autobiographical enough, Salvador (Antonio Banderas) made his name in the 1980s, also the heyday of his social and love life in Madrid.  He still lives there but alone now, except for his aches and pains, his medication and memories.

In Pain and Glory‘s present, Salvador is in no position to create new work but ‘Sabor’ (‘Flavour’), a movie he made thirty years ago, has been re-mastered and is about to be re-released.  Salvador pays a call on Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), ‘Sabor’’s lead actor.  The pair fell out at the time of the film’s original release, when Salvador publicly criticised Alberto’s interpretation of the main character, and they haven’t spoken since.  The meeting results in a rapprochement of sorts but doesn’t exactly clear the air:  a persisting wariness between the men hangs heavier in it than the fumes of the heroin Alberto smokes and that Salvador now takes up.  It makes a change from the cocktail of other drugs required for his back pain, migraines and depression.

The story’s past tense comprises Salvador’s flashbacks, more or less obviously triggered by incidents in the present, to his disadvantaged childhood in rural Valencia and Catholic schooling.  As a boy (Asier Flores), Salvador moved with his parents (Penélope Cruz and Raúl Arévalo) to a colony of cave dwellings. His feckless, ex-soldier father couldn’t afford anything else.  His resourceful mother Jacinta is determined to make a home of the place.  She arranges for her precociously bright young son to teach Eduardo (César Vicente), an illiterate young labourer, to read and write.  In exchange, Eduardo will decorate and carpenter the cave space.

Salvador loses his nerve and fails to turn up for a Q&A at a screening of ‘Sabor’.  The event’s anxious host (Julián López) makes phone contact and Salvador, at home with Alberto at his side, hears the film audience’s enthusiastic applause. A remote Q&A gets underway but soon leads to a renewed outbreak of hostilities between Salvador and Alberto:  the director reckons the actor’s performance has improved with the passage of time but is still more expansive on what he thought was wrong with it in the first place.  This isn’t the end of their renewed contact, however.  Alberto discovers ‘Addiction’, a piece written by Salvador some time ago, describing his life in 1980s Madrid and passionate affair with a young man who was a heroin addict.  Alberto wants to perform ‘Addiction’ as a stage monologue.  Salvador, offering the piece as a kind of olive branch, agrees.

Up to this point, Pain and Glory is a gracefully melancholy, dramatically modest film.  It’s suddenly elevated by a typical Almodóvar device:  a chance event that is melodramatically improbable but which, within a few screen minutes, feels emotionally inevitable and compels belief.  When Alberto performs ‘Addiction’, the theatre audience includes the real-life model for the young addict.  This is Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who now lives in Argentina but happens to be in Madrid on family business.  He also happens to see the play’s poster, bearing Salvador’s name, and buys a ticket.  After the performance, he goes to Alberto’s dressing room and explains who he is.

A couple of phone calls later, Federico is in Salvador’s apartment.  What follows – the meeting culminates in an ardent kiss but goes no further physically:  Federico doesn’t stay the night and takes his leave – is as extraordinarily tender as the scenes between the two young men in the last act of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight but more verbal on both sides of the conversation, and funnier.  Federico, the father of two sons, is divorcing his first wife but has a new female partner.   When he adds that the affair with Salvador was his last with a man, Salvador replies, ‘I’m not sure how to take that’.  They both laugh before Federico assures Salvador he should take it as a compliment.

Beautifully played by Antonio Banderas and Leonardo Sbaraglia, this exchange is – for Salvador, as for the film as a whole – a shot in the arm, although that injective phrase is hardly appropriate.  The reappearance of Federico, brief as it is, and the discovery that he overcame his addiction, are revitalising enough for Salvador to seek medical help for his own increasing dependency, and for the frightening choking bouts to which he’s increasingly prone.  The prospect of his own treatment seems to spark memories from Salvador’s more recent past and the last days of his elderly widowed mother (Julieta Serrano), who tells him, affectionately but firmly, that he’s not been a good son.  Jacinta stays with him in Madrid before being hospitalised there. Salvador wants to make amends for having (as she sees it) abandoned her years before but he fails again.  His mother dies in Madrid before he can take her back to the country, where she wanted her life to end.

Another amazing coincidence is the trigger for Salvador’s remembrance of a pivotal incident in the growth of his sexual awareness, and for Almodóvar’s creation of another masterly sequence.  At an art exhibition, Salvador sees a portrait of a young boy.  He recognises the boy as himself and the work as that of Eduardo, who painted pictures as well as walls.  He recalls the day when Eduardo tiled the kitchen area of the cave house, breaking off to make the sketch for the portrait of Salvador, as the boy sat reading a book, in blazing sun.  Jacinta was out at work and her husband, as usual, drinking in a bar.  After finishing the tiles, Eduardo says he needs a wash while Salvador, suffering from the heat, lies down on his bed.  As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he’s aware of Eduardo’s ablutions a few feet away.  The young man, who has stripped, calls to Salvador to bring him a towel.  The boy does so, finds himself facing the naked Eduardo, and faints.

From start to finish, the film’s colouring is exhilarating.  The opening credits appear against a changing background of marbled papers, each differently patterned and animated.  The imaginatively co-ordinated tones of the characters’ clothes are a recurring delight.  The art work on the walls of Salvador’s apartment (if Wikipedia is right, this is Almodóvar’s actual home) inevitably takes the eye but, along the bookshelves, even some of the book spines are picked out to vivid effect.  The visual achievement of the key episode involving Eduardo is more subtly powerful.  There’s a shot of Salvador, as he sits reading, in which José Luis Alcaine magically seems to show the sun penetrating his hair.  As he lies on his side drowsing, Salvador’s left cheek is flushed.  How much this is down to the heat and how much to the image of Eduardo of which he’s intermittently conscious is hard to tell.

Federico insists he’ll hold Salvador to his promise to visit him and his family in Buenos Aires, they exchange contact details but you don’t feel another meeting is likely to happen.  The sense that, for Salvador, this would be too good to be true chimes with a moment later in the film.   Salvador buys Edoardo’s portrait of him and finds inscribed on the back a letter from the artist, thanking Salvador for teaching him to read and write, explaining that he now works as a store assistant.  (It seems Eduardo sent the painting and letter to Salvador’s home after the boy had gone to boarding school but Jacinta got rid of it.)  When his assistant Mercedes (Nora Navas) says that he could, if he tried, track Eduardo down, Salvador dismisses the idea as far-fetched – although, he says, searching for and finding Eduardo would make a good script.  Mercedes’s suggestion will resonate with anyone who feels they have emotionally unfinished business in their past that they’d love the chance belatedly to sort out, impossible as that may now be.  Salvador’s response confirms a central idea of the story:  Almodóvar is in effect acknowledging that improbable things can be made to happen in fiction that can’t happen in fact.  Yet an artist of fiction can make them true, as Salvador’s reunion with Federico proves.

Salvador isn’t suffering from the oesophageal cancer that he and Mercedes fear:  the choking is caused by a benign growth that is surgically removed.  He gets a new artistic lease of life too.  In the last scene of the film, the child Salvador and his mother, en route to the neighbourhood of cave houses where they’re to meet Salvador’s father, have to sleep on the floor of a railway station while the village they’re passing through holds a festival.  The boy is enchanted by the fireworks in the night sky; his mother is worried and upset.  Almodóvar pulls back to reveal a sound engineer; then a camera; then, behind the camera, Salvador directing.  There’s nothing ‘meta’ or anti-climactic about this.  A conclusive illustration that Pain and Glory is all about creating cinema, it’s a perfect ending.

As usual in Almodóvar, the casting and acting are close to impeccable.  Having Antonio Banderas incarnate his alter ego could be said to amount to wishful thinking on the writer-director’s part but this isn’t enough of a literal autobiography for the physical dissimilarity to matter, let alone detract from the film.   Besides, the actor’s own health problems of recent years resonate in his playing the ailing Salvador.  Banderas has always been a good-natured screen presence.  After highly successful work in early Almodóvar, this has tended to limit the range of roles in which he’s been effective:  he has seemed rather lightweight for serious drama.  Almodóvar exploited his mildness interestingly in The Skin I Live In (2011) but Banderas’s work in Pain and Glory has a new depth.  He expresses regret and vulnerability with economy and penetration.  In the outstanding scene with Leonardo Sbaraglia, Banderas reveals Salvador’s enduring affection for the man who, decades ago, inspired such passion in him.  It’s not too fanciful to think that, in conveying this affection, he’s drawing on his own fond gratitude towards Almodóvar, to whom he owes so much professionally.

As the child Salvador, Asier Flores is a fine blend of stubbornness and receptivity to new experience.  César Vicente captures Eduardo’s ingenuousness very naturally.  Her star beauty makes it easy to underestimate Penélope Cruz’s acting, whose characterisation of Salvador’s mother Jacinta is sharply convincing.  It links well with octogenarian Julieta Serrano’s eloquent version of the mother – as a responsible, strong-willed woman, rightly irked by her son’s assumption that, because she’s not highly educated, she’s therefore imperceptive.   Except for Jacinta and the exasperated but loyal Mercedes, female characters aren’t as prominent as they’ve traditionally been in Almodóvar’s cinema, a feature of Pain and Glory both mitigated and emphasised by the fleeting appearance of Cecilia Roth, the lead in All About My Mother (1999), as the acquaintance who puts Salvador in touch with Alberto Crespo.

Asier Etxeandia is an unusually versatile actor.  In each of the three roles I’ve seen him play – Alberto here, the gynaecologist in Ma Ma (2015) and the fashion designer in the daft but enjoyable Spanish TV series Velvet available on Netflix – he is remarkably transformed.   The change from one part to the next goes beyond obvious character differences, clothes and hairstyle:  Etxeandia becomes an entirely new creation.  In Pain and Glory, it’s these protean gifts that sustain interest in an amusing but shallowly conceived part.  Almodóvar jettisons the smouldering, thin-skinned Alberto once he’s served his plot purpose and he leaves no emotional residue – unlike Federico.  In terms of his function in the story, Salvador’s wiry, hangdog father seems to be the latest paternal nonentity in the Almodóvar oeuvre but Raúl Arévalo makes such a strong impression during his brief time on screen that you don’t forget him either.

Salvador reflects on his past; the audience recalls the preoccupations of, and the faces from, other Almodóvar pictures.  This dual operation of memory is essential to Pain and Glory.  (Each time I type the title I have to stop myself calling it ‘Pain and Desire’, and I can see why.   This is, as usual, an ‘El Deseo’ production.  The movie that Salvador is eventually seen to be making is called ‘The First Desire’.)  Although technically self-contained, the film and its attributes are enhanced by associations with a larger body of work.  José Luis Alcaine’s cinematography and Alberto Iglesias’s score, admirable in their own right, are enriched because both men have collaborated so often and fruitfully with Almodóvar before.  It’s difficult to imagine what viewers seeing their first Almodóvar will make of this, his twenty-first feature.  For those of us familiar with plenty of its forerunners, Pain and Glory is a film to treasure.

28 August 2019