Bitter Christmas announces that Pedro Almodóvar has entered his late era, returning once again to the metafiction well for another structurally ambitious analysis of the creative process with at least one character to whom he bears a passing resemblance. It will be nobody’s favorite Almodóvar film, but offers some simple delights because it might be the most Almodóvar film; its deconstruction of a director’s writing routine feels oddly comforting, despite attempts to confound each time it pulls the rug back to reveal a new layer in its Russian doll of character perspectives. An autofictional exploration of creation has been a recurring interest since 1995’s The Flower of My Secret, with 2019’s Pain and Glory feeling like the definitive statement in this regard, featuring his most barely concealed director surrogate to date (Antonio Banderas’ Salvador Mallo) and a direct address of the various chronic conditions which have affected his work. His latest doesn’t add a profound new perspective that justifies going back to such similar subject matter; the familiarity of this preoccupation means it becomes more of a surface pleasure than another revelatory look at how a master auteur gets inspiration.
Bitter Christmas divides its time between 2004 and 2025, introducing the semi-retired director Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) in the earlier stretch as she’s being admitted to a hospital with a debilitating migraine, the first not-too-subtle invitation to regard her as an Almodóvar surrogate. A filmmaker who had made two cult movies a decade prior, she begins growing reflective after being admitted to one of the wards which featured in a hospital drama she made, asking to move rooms as the character in one of them had passed away. After discovering she’s battling a series of sustained panic attacks and has found the right medication, a meeting with a therapist reveals she’s battling unprocessed trauma born of never pausing work to mourn her mother’s death a year earlier. She soon reconnects with two very different friends––Patricia (Victoria Luengo), whose husband is having an affair, and Natalia (Melena Smit), whose young son died in a car accident while she was driving––and soon finds her streak of writer’s block broken, their shared experiences all feeding into the narrative of her next project.
That, of course, is just the film-within-a-film, which is written with what suggests purposeful messiness. Whether you have the patience to sit through this self-indulgent stretch that forms the majority of the runtime—which dramatizes what is transparently a badly structured, narratively half-baked screenplay by the primary director proxy Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia)—will depend on the level of personal affection you have for Almodóvar’s work up to this point. He holds his own feet to the fire when it comes to examining a director’s responsibility for incorporating other people’s stories into a work of autofiction, but overt self-critique comes relatively late into the drama. For the most part, Bitter Christmas‘ film-within-a-film plays at face value with very few interruptions from the director writing it; this proves endearing as another of Almodóvar’s contemporary takes on a Sirkian women’s picture, but can never quite escape its own slightness, even if the minor nature of this work is all part of grander design.
For hopping around in time periods with little notice, allowing for excessive interludes of male strip-teases or needle-drops of the director’s beloved Chavela Vargas, and never satisfactorily offering closure to many of its longest-standing character arcs, it feels like a filmed first draft, touching on a director’s many obsessions but never weaving them into anything as emotionally captivating as his best work. The roughness gives the impression that we’re seeing what Raúl has written just as it hits the page, with brief interstitial shots of him at his laptop reaffirming that we’re witnessing someone in the process of inspiration, but no overall destination.
Almodóvar is a stellar writer and naturally gifted collaborator with actors, which means that seeing what feels like one of his messy drafts offers more of an appeal than those of most directors, even if what we have is adapting a shambolic-by-design script. Not equally dividing time between Elsa and Raúl does mean that its most critical observations of the creative process––the director has described it in interviews as “the film where I’ve been cruellest to myself”––are given less weight, filtered into the comparatively lightweight character drama instead of granted breathing room at the surface. The third act, where both strands come together to form a more cohesive statement on artistic responsibility, proves more funny in its satirization of an irresponsible director than it does insightful, if only because the movie feels reverse-engineered to justify every single complaint his former assistant Monica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) lobbies in his direction.
And maybe that’s why Bitter Christmas works better as an Almodóvar comfort movie than the more seething, cynical continuation of his explorations of the artistic process. Even with its weaponized slightness, an approach few filmmakers can leverage into something watchable, it still seems a feature-length build-up to a punchline rather than an interrogation of autofiction that could match his prior, more incisive work in this arena. But then, Almodóvar making one of the least-imaginative, most-familiar stories he could conceive still offers plenty of surface pleasures; his late style may be in the shadow of former glories, but it was always going to look a lot better than most contemporaries.
Bitter Christmas opens in U.K. theaters on August 28 and U.S. theaters on November 13.
The post Bitter Christmas Review: Pedro Almodóvar Explores His Creative Process In Comforting Metafiction first appeared on The Film Stage.
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