Almodovar’s ode to the power of cinema
I miss early Almodovar and his funny, raunchy, brazen provocations that broke every taboo in Spanish culture and mainstream film in general. His latest movie is a deeply felt, nostalgic rumination on creativity and the magic power of movies.
Antonio Banderas, grizzled and convincingly racked by pain, plays Salvador Mallo, a renowned Spanish film director who suffers from all kinds of maladies, physical and emotional, that prevent him from directing again. The man is dying. He hides from the world and remembers his childhood with sunny memories of poverty and an early passion for movies. A restoration of one of his own films forces him to deal with his past and with the present.
Like many of his mid-career and later films, Pain and Glory is not shy of psychodrama. Almodovar still peppers it with hilarious one-liners, although I wish there were more of them. No one is better at giving ordinary characters hilarious lines said in utter seriousness. Almodovar pays homage to his many influences, from Hollywood to Chavela Vargas, his love of Latin America, to his intensely symbiotic relationship to his own country. Like in all his other movies, Spain is an important character. Pain and Glory references “catholic, apostolic” Spain in all its pain and glory: its poverty, and benighted, conservative Francoism, but also its creative…
