‘Pain and Glory’ by Pedro Almodovar
Review by Peter Belsito
I really loved this film.
A great viewing experience both for those of us schooled over the years in Director Almodovar’s visionary work and to others seeing his mastery for the first time.
What struck me most and seems strangely unmentioned is that this is a gay themed biopic of a great man who is gay.
From childhood up to his later years of a successful life the film Pain and Glory follows his progression. He is in a life crisis now in the present.
I found it fascinating and beautifully unique.
Creator (Director/ Writer) Almodovar seems throughout to be making personal his own life observations. What does a great man — gay, successful and endlessly creative do now? When he is older but still active.
Antonio Banderas, no longer young, is really sublime and sensitive here. And his character’s life is very troubled.
Every so often in Pedro Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory,” Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) closes his eyes and drifts away. A celebrated Spanish filmmaker, Salvador has lost his bearings. He’s gravely depressed, and his body seems to have permanently surrendered to his maladies, to his bad back, migraines, asthma and fits of terrifying, mysterious choking. When a friend offers him some heroin to smoke, Salvador readily lights up and disappears. His nagging pains suddenly give way to images from his childhood, idylls that brighten the screen like beacons in a fog.
A story of memory and creation, youth and its loss, “Pain and Glory” circles around the idea of art as self-creation. The precipitating event — the thing that nudges Salvador and the movie forward — is the screening of an early triumph, a 1980s film called “Sabor.” (Its poster is suitably Almodóvarian: a strawberry-like tongue licking its luscious red lips.) Uneasy about the screening, Salvador reaches out to one of its actors, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), a debauched looker with dangerous habits.
The screening turns into a mild farce, but it stirs something in Salvador, lighting a small fire. The grinning face of death hangs over “Pain and Glory,” but it soon emerges that Salvador’s most debilitating issue is that he is a man without desire. He’s alone and hasn’t made movie in a while, and a new one doesn’t seem on the horizon. Yet even as he idles, his will to create — to dream, share stories, make drama — remains strong. His life seems like a melodrama or a comedy even.
The narrative is elegantly structured rather than clotted, and its tone is contemplative as opposed to frantic, as if he had turned down the volume. A great deal happens in “Pain and Glory,” just not ritualistically and not at top volume. Its agonies are tempered, its regrets hushed, its restraint powerful.
All that said, the first time you see Salvador he’s at the bottom of a cerulean-blue swimming pool in a seated position, as still and heavy as a dropped anchor. He looks like he’s meditating, but then again he might be drowning. Whatever the case, the shot and its uncomfortable duration (you may find yourself nervously counting off the seconds) create a sense of mounting unease. Salvador looks so vulnerable with his near-nakedness and arms akimbo, a vivid scar slashed across his torso.
This introduction could sink a less gifted director, but Almodóvar is a virtuoso of changes and soon cuts to a young boy at a river where women wash clothes and break into melodious song. Light and bright and shimmering with beauty, it is the first in a series of scenes from Salvador’s childhood scattered throughout the movie. Taken together, they create a wistful, emotionally vibrant counterpoint to the adult Salvador’s lonely, austere odyssey. Yet while they look like flashbacks, they’re closer to idealized reveries than to raw memories.
Almodóvar has long drawn from his own history for his movies, most obviously with protagonists who are filmmakers.
(He calls “Pain and Glory” the final installment in a triptych that includes “Law of Desire” and “Bad Education.”)
In “Pain and Glory,” Almodóvar’s home doubles for Salvador’s; Banderas wears some of the director’s clothes and has similarly styled hair and beard. These teasing biographical gestures blur the line between reality and representation, but to see this movie as confessional would miss the point. The point is the blur, that in-between space where art blooms.
Banderas’s melancholic presence and subtle, intricate performance add depth and intensities of feeling both because he draws so flawlessly from Almodóvar.
(This is the eighth movie they’ve made together in the last four decades.)
With his downcast eyes, sagging posture, silences and self-imposed isolation, Salvador looks like a man in retreat. He would be a figure of pure pathos if it weren’t clear that Salvador also suffers from vanity.
Salvador’s crisis is real, but it lightens the heaviness and gives you permission to laugh.
“Pain and Glory” can be achingly sad, but its pleasures, rainbow hues and humor keep it (and you) aloft.
Director Almodovar
For a depressed man, Salvador still puts on a lively show, wearing splashes of color. Like his exquisitely appointed house, his clothing reminds you — as does Almodóvar’s staging of many conversations — how we turn ourselves into performers, our homes into theaters, the world into our audience.
The problem with Salvador is that somewhere along the line, as a visitor suggests, his home became a museum. Is it his mausoleum?
How do you come back from the dead?
For Salvador, the answer comes in fits and starts, in the burnished images of his childhood, in an old lover’s passion, in the power of art. It also comes in his love for Jacinta, who as an older woman (Julieta Serrano) nearing death, voices distaste for autobiographical fiction, telling Salvador he wasn’t a good son.
It’s clear why: He grew up, lived his life, fell in love with a man, became an artist.
His choices were as unforgivable as they were inescapable. But Salvador listens, and he apologizes. And then he takes the messiness, the vibrancy and the sensuous pleasures of life as he remembers it and turns his pain — and hers — into glory.
Asier Flores plays Salvador when he’s around 9; Penélope Cruz lights up the screen as his mother, Jacinta.
International Sales Agent: Film Nation
US Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
World Premiere: Cannes Film Festival 2019 winner
Cannes Soundtrack Award for Best Composer Alberto Iglesias, Best Actor Award for Antonio Banderas.
