PAIN AND GLORY ***
Pedro Almodóvar
2019
IDEA: On the eve of a repertory screening of one of his old works, a filmmaker beset by physical and mental ailments reminisces about his life.
BLURB: A warm, confessional work of auto-fiction, Pain and Glory movingly figures Almodóvar’s life as an ongoing act of cinematic self-realization, with everything he’s gone through finding dramatic purpose and cathartic emotional outlet through the conduit of his chosen medium. Here, it’s a process that’s actively literalized via meta-text, as Antonio Banderas’ infirm director Salvador Mallo, Almodóvar’s stand-in, reflects on all the people, places, and events that have shaped his career and life trajectories. Naturally, he recollects his Catholic upbringing, his mother, his sexual awakening; all the relationships broken by the depredations of time and circumstance. He might be unable to make movies, but these bittersweet reveries themselves become the movie before us, instinctually transmuting the weariness and nostalgia of Almodóvar’s more advanced years into both its explicit content and its underlying catalyst. Pain and Glory thus becomes a testament to cinema as a channel for personal coping and spiritual rejuvenation, its episodic structure playing host to a series of poignant rapprochements that interpret Almodóvar’s experiences within the therapeutic imaginary space of the screen. Although he sometimes tips over into self-congratulation, an easy hazard for memoir, the director avoids arrogance by sensitively conveying how no fictional film, not even an autobiographical one, can possibly be made alone, and how no individual is ever an island. The characters who appear throughout – a former actor, a laborer, and, in its most extraordinary scene, an old flame – are understood as equals and collaborators, the people without whom his visions could never be realized. And in the gentle, rueful, frequently palliating feelings they generate, Pain and Glory posits itself, indeed cinema in general, as a kind of eternal salve for the soul.
BLURB: A warm, confessional work of auto-fiction, Pain and Glory movingly figures Almodóvar’s life as an ongoing act of cinematic self-realization, with everything he’s gone through finding dramatic purpose and cathartic emotional outlet through the conduit of his chosen medium. Here, it’s a process that’s actively literalized via meta-text, as Antonio Banderas’ infirm director Salvador Mallo, Almodóvar’s stand-in, reflects on all the people, places, and events that have shaped his career and life trajectories. Naturally, he recollects his Catholic upbringing, his mother, his sexual awakening; all the relationships broken by the depredations of time and circumstance. He might be unable to make movies, but these bittersweet reveries themselves become the movie before us, instinctually transmuting the weariness and nostalgia of Almodóvar’s more advanced years into both its explicit content and its underlying catalyst. Pain and Glory thus becomes a testament to cinema as a channel for personal coping and spiritual rejuvenation, its episodic structure playing host to a series of poignant rapprochements that interpret Almodóvar’s experiences within the therapeutic imaginary space of the screen. Although he sometimes tips over into self-congratulation, an easy hazard for memoir, the director avoids arrogance by sensitively conveying how no fictional film, not even an autobiographical one, can possibly be made alone, and how no individual is ever an island. The characters who appear throughout – a former actor, a laborer, and, in its most extraordinary scene, an old flame – are understood as equals and collaborators, the people without whom his visions could never be realized. And in the gentle, rueful, frequently palliating feelings they generate, Pain and Glory posits itself, indeed cinema in general, as a kind of eternal salve for the soul.
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