He was once the bad boy of Spanish cinema. Today, Almodóvar has nothing left to say
In his new film, "Bitter Christmas," Pedro Almodóvar returns to the themes that have occupied him throughout his career - the pain of creation, motherhood, loss, and the way artists feed on the lives of others. The result is aesthetic, occasionally enjoyable, and highly self-aware, but it also sometimes feels like the work of a director who has already asked himself the same questions - and did so much more interestingly in the past.
In Pedro Almodóvar's new film, "Bitter Christmas" (Amarga Navidad), we return again and again to the image of a filmmaker whose greatness is behind him, sitting and writing, deleting, and writing again on his computer the plot of the film-within-a-film that we are watching. No one expects a cinematic breakthrough from Almodóvar today, but the problem with his current film — which is quite enjoyable, it must be admitted, and incredibly aesthetic — is that this image is exactly what it is: an expression of the crisis experienced by the director. He draws inspiration from the dramas in the lives of those close to him to turn them into material for his emerging film. It is not something we haven't seen countless times before.
Throughout the film, certainly in its final part, you find yourself wondering if this self-awareness says something new or at least interesting about the act of creation. Does the situation at its center — a director writing himself in the image of a female filmmaker — accumulate into an emotional and authentic presence that reveals Almodóvar himself to us? Does that auto-fiction, a concept mentioned in the film by one of the characters, produce a renewed interpretive reading of the text? And what does Almodóvar actually say about his work when he talks about the way the experiences of close people serve as a source and inspiration for the artistic act?
Here too, it seems that Almodóvar is recycling modernist themes — culminating in Federico Fellini's seminal film "8½" — rather than offering something new. To put it less delicately: "Bitter Christmas" turns out to be a film that tries too hard to say something about itself. Almodóvar, once the enfant terrible of Spanish cinema, is already 76, and at this stage in his career, it seems that he too wonders if he has anything left to say.
About two years ago, this search led him outside the borders of his homeland, when he directed his first full-length English-language film, "The Room Next Door" (2024). In fact, Almodóvar had already engaged in a late soul-searching in a previous film of his, "Pain and Glory" (2019), whose protagonist was an aging film director, played by Antonio Banderas, on whom the ravages of the body were taking their toll. Now, his alter-ego is a Spanish female filmmaker named Elsa (Barbara Lennie), whose health is also not great; she is hospitalized following a severe migraine that turns out to be a panic attack.
In the present, we meet a homosexual film director named Raul (Leonardo Sbaraglia) who is actually writing the story we have been watching. If there is a certain novelty in the film titled "Bitter Christmas" — the title is taken from a song by the Mexican singer Chavela Vargas — it is in the gender reversal that takes place in the director's identification of himself with a woman, a filmmaker. A bit like a vampire feeding on young blood, Raul also requires the life of his partner, Santi (Quim Gutiérrez), as a source of inspiration, but this turns out to be insufficient. The script does not hold up a full-length film, and to expand it, Raul takes an extreme step that confronts him with his muse and his longtime personal assistant, Monica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón).
There is something very cruel in the way Almodóvar treats creation in the film. The problem is that the result this time seems shallow and, above all, lacks a particularly interesting statement: the use of a film-within-a-film, the meta-poetics that Almodóvar enjoys so much, now seem like the artistic nagging of a director whose fame is truly behind him. The character of Monica serves as a moral voice for him that identifies the ethical and creative failure of Raul/Almodóvar. This is what makes the concluding part of "Bitter Christmas" a self-indictment with dramatic and emotional power.
"Bitter Christmas" is a film that deals to a large extent with the process of its own creation. The title "Fin" even appears in it not as is customary at the end, but in the place where Raul finishes writing the script that turns out to be too short. We understand that Almodóvar is still looking for the concluding act, the one that will give the film the missing punchline. The problem is that the world of imagery that Almodóvar requires when he comes to discuss the pains of creation — which are others' more than his own — is hackneyed. The film lost me when I first saw Raul sitting and typing the script for the film about Elsa.
There is something sober, and even cruel, in this self-awareness of Almodóvar, as if the film itself acknowledges the possibility that it too is a work that would have been better off not being born. A film whose birth is in sin and whose blood its creator sucks from his sources of inspiration poisons it instead of bringing it to life. And perhaps in this recognition also lies Almodóvar's attempt, right in the last scene, to redeem his work — and incidentally himself as well. Perhaps his next film will be the next great work, the one that begins to be written at the end.
