Bitter Christmas It is the 24th feature film by Pedro Almodóvar over the course of 46 years. There was no gap of more than three years between his releases. He won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in the 1990s (It’s all about my mother), Academy Award for Best Screenplay of the 2000s (Talk to her) And the Grand Prize of the Venice Film Festival, the Golden Lion, only two years ago (Next room). With his latest film Bitter Christmasthe 76-year-old Spaniard remains on this troubled path, pushing himself deeper into uncharted territory – this time, by turning the camera back on himself.
In fact, he does so within several sections of his dramatic cinematic puppet. The main plot follows Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a highly regarded film director today — who in many ways resembles Almodovar more than the spiked silver hair — as he writes a screenplay inspired by a period of his life two decades earlier. bitterChristmas The shifts between Raúl’s daily life, centered around his real-life relationships with his assistant Mónica (Etana Sánchez Gijón) and her boyfriend Santi (Kim Gutierrez) seep into his imagination, and the evolving action of Raúl’s film (aka Bitter Christmas — Yes, we’re getting very meta here.) This final arc follows a director named Elsa (Barbara Linney) who begins suffering panic attacks while feeling her relationship with her new boyfriend, a cute stripper and firefighter named Bonifacio (Patrick Criado).
Raoul ponders how to use reality to tell Elsa’s story. At some point, he confronts a loved one about inserting a vulnerable, private moment from their life into the end of his scenario. He considers the overlap between Santi and Bonifacio. It may feel like you’re watching a documentary about Almodovar, but of course the director himself is third class. Raoul is also told through his lens.
This created an emotional process for Almodóvar, a master of melodrama who became richly personal with modern classics like Bad education and Pain and glory. “This is a film where I reveal myself a lot,” he says. “I’ve always been drawn to the very ambiguous relationship between reality and creativity. I didn’t want to hold back from criticizing myself and my creative process.”
Almodovar fans can read on Bitter Christmas As much as they want it to be – the lines between fact and fiction are blurry and ambiguous, and in conversation, Almodovar shares key autobiographical reference points without diving into details.
Still, it’s a fascinating reflection, especially for a director who’s never been afraid of big emotions rooted in painful truth. The dynamic between the patient, irascible Elsa and the suave Bonifacio draws directly from Almodovar’s own relationship with her boyfriend from the early 2000s. (The director’s long-term partner is actor and photographer Fernando Iglesias.) “Migraines have been with me for a long time of my life, but panic attacks were new to me, and this person, who I was at the beginning of a relationship with, really saved me that first terrible weekend when it happened,” Almodovar says.
As Elsa’s story unfolds under Raoul’s typewriter line by line, Bonifacio fades from this part of the narrative. There is a deliberate “silence” here, as Almodovar says: Does Bonifacio miss Elsa? Does she feel frustrated because she’s so busy? Happy to wait for her return? The manager won’t say. “You don’t really know a lot — like the relationship between Raul and Santi,” he says. “You don’t know whether this is a joyful, very shared physical partnership or whether one is more in love than the other. There’s not a lot of information being shared.”
Almodóvar is implicitly sharing here, of course, that he knows what he wants to withhold in interviews as well. What we don’t know about the characters, we don’t know about them.
Bitter Christmas It takes a more thorny turn when Raoul goes too far in his exploration of autofiction. This connects the film’s two timelines with an intense electrical current back to their creator. Almodovar has had to consider how far this line of storytelling can go – and perhaps, as a result, where he sets his line of fiction to take over more clearly. “It’s a moral intuition more than anything else, because this kind of self-imagination doesn’t set any boundaries, right?” He says. “The line for me is that I don’t want to hurt the people I use as inspiration. So far, I think I’ve succeeded. But when you’re dealing with reality and fiction, it’s always a blurry line – the boundaries are very porous.”
Almodovar re-examines this as we talk further, talking frankly about how difficult it is for any subject to remain out of the artist’s way, no matter how loosely defined or camouflaged with modified characteristics. “When an author writes about the reality closest to him,” Almodovar later says, “you have to think that writers will always be selfish.” “Once they have an idea for a story, they won’t necessarily think about who it will hurt or not. Once you have that story, and that inspiration, it becomes very powerful and valuable — as a writer, you don’t let it go.”
This idea is clearly on Almodovar’s mind these days. Bitter Christmas It will make its North American debut at the Toronto Film Festival on September 13, before hitting select US theaters on November 13 – and so far, Almodóvar has been happy to see audiences approach the film on its own strange terms.
Meta-storytelling is in the air: We happen to be talking on publication day life mRachel Cusk’s novel is widely claimed to center on a thinly veiled (and not always attractive) version of Natalie Portman. The truth is certainly more complicated — Cusk declined to comment on the rumors at all — but the media frenzy has already taken over the narrative surrounding it. “This is one example where using inspiration can do some harm,” says Almodóvar, curious to learn more about Cusk’s book. “It is the danger of self-imagination, which then turns into mere gossip.”
Almodóvar’s goal was the opposite: to look inward, to offer a director with a body of work as deep and masterful as anyone of his generation, a rare and unvarnished window into how and why he does what he does. And perhaps he is negotiating, in real time, for all to see, his dramatic limits.
In fact, first of all, Bitter Christmas It reveals Almodovar’s deep and abiding love for filmmaking and why it’s not stopping anytime soon. “I invest in the power of the story, making sure it works, and that the story interests people – the script is my focus,” he says. No matter the degree to which a film like this becomes an exercise in veiled memoir, “It’s never about any kind of thought about my well-being. For me, the reality of filmmaking is psychological support.”
It is no coincidence that he began to find cinematic form for these sillier ideas later in his career: “You lose the fear of exposing your intimacy,” he says. The result, inevitably, is one of Almodovar’s bravest works – although, or perhaps because, it raises more questions for the viewer along the way.
