Gaby Wood: At the Movies

Gaby Wood

At the height of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, Bitter Christmas, Raúl, a writer-director played by Leonardo Sbaraglia, has a heated argument with his former assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). Mónica has worked for Raúl for twenty years, and is, as Raúl puts it, his ‘first and best reader’, but she’s recently left the job to look after a suicidal friend whose child has died. In short order, Raúl has incorporated the dead child and the suicide attempt into his latest script. He hasn’t made a film for five years and these tragedies were just what he needed to relieve his creative block.

‘How dare you?’ Mónica says, bursting into his house. Raúl shrugs it off:

‘You know what fiction is like.’

‘This isn’t fiction.’

‘Autofiction: bullshit?’ is the game Almodóvar is laying out. Whose story is it? His most explicitly autobiographical film so far, the elegiac Pain and Glory, was released seven years ago; Bitter Christmas is more a cousin to it than a sequel (in the earlier film the director’s alter ego is played by Antonio Banderas, and Sbaraglia makes an appearance as his long-lost lover). In both, the film director is in physical pain; in both he can’t get over the death of his mother. But if Pain and Glory looked back on a life – a film director plagued by injury reflects on his childhood and on the bridges he’s burned – then Bitter Christmas broaches the fraught process by which his creations come about.

‘I think it is the riskiest film I’ve ever made,’ Almodóvar said in a recent interview. ‘I took a whole bunch of risks, even knowing that some might not land.’ If what he means by this is that he risked making a diffuse and somewhat mannered movie, then I would say he has fallen squarely into the trap. A film director makes a film about a film director making a film about a film director who may just about manage to make a film, if migraines and panic attacks allow: it’s not Almodóvar’s – or anyone’s – most gripping plot, and he was once a notably fiendish plotter. In the short story that became the kernel of Bitter Christmas, written in 2003 and published in his first collection of short fiction, which came out last year, Almodóvar sums it up himself: ‘Migraines and panic do not make for interesting cinema because they’re not linked to action, a character suffering from them does so passively.’ But if we consider it less as a viewing experience in its own right than as a reflection on Almodóvar’s own working methods – a mea culpa, even – then Bitter Christmas has plenty to say.

The film opens with Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a director who has made a living from advertising for some time. She has a headache and an implausible boyfriend: Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), nicknamed Beau, who is a firefighter by day and a nightclub stripper by night. Elsa’s migraine takes them to the hospital, where – coincidentally – she shot the second of her two films all those years ago. She claims not to be superstitious but still asks to be taken to a particular room, since, in her film, the fictional character who was treated in the opposite room died. A doctor appears. She thinks she recognises Elsa, and then, more awkwardly, thinks she recognises the stripper. ‘I read somewhere that over time that became a cult film,’ the doctor says of Elsa’s hospital movie. ‘What does “cult” mean? Do you belong to some sort of sect?’ ‘No,’ Elsa replies with amusement. ‘I’ve only directed two films and neither of them was a success. The fact that they’re “cult” films means most people aren’t interested in them. They were failures.’

The scene is a deliberate self-parody and self-laceration. Almodóvar’s first two films, Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980) and Labyrinth of Passion (1982), became cult classics, and in the latter the character played by Cecilia Roth falls in love with a gay man – not far off the signals sent by Beau here.

Almodóvar’s films have often been connected to one another – most obviously by the actresses who recur in them, but occasionally also through a sort of narrative baton-passing. Details in The Flower of My Secret (1995) gave rise to two later films: a training session for doctors provided the opening premise for All about My Mother (1999); a rejected book manuscript written by its protagonist was the basis for Volver (2006).

But this is different. The hospital scene is not a credible thread connecting Bitter Christmas to earlier films but a blatant indication of an auteur at a loss. Elsa, as we are to discover, is a confection – the creation of Raúl, who has decided to make his alter ego a woman – and you could say that in the script we are seeing dramatised here he’s relying a bit too much on his old tricks: absurd conversations, unlikely coincidences. The scene is not only a self-referential joke on Almodóvar’s part but an early clue to the fact that what we are watching is a work in progress of Raúl’s: it’s so clearly an Almodóvaresque placeholder that it’s waiting to be rewritten in a later draft. ‘Did you not like the script?’ Raúl asks Mónica. ‘I still have to polish it.’

In the 1980s and 1990s, Almodóvar took aspects of classic Hollywood melodrama, borrowed the behaviour of screwball heroines, upped the already saturated colour of Douglas Sirk’s so-called ‘women’s pictures’, and developed a style of his own. His early films had an antic comedy and featured underground characters who flaunted their post-Franco freedoms with panache. His women were the fast-talking, coarse-voiced heirs to certain Hollywood stars of the 1950s. In one film, a character’s job is to dub a Joan Crawford movie into Spanish. In another a mother and son complain about the Spanish translation of the title of All about Eve (‘Eva al desnudo’: ‘The Naked Eve’ or ‘Eve Stripped Bare’). ‘I took up smoking because of Bette Davis,’ Marisa Paredes says dejectedly in All about My Mother. At least two Almodóvar films owe a debt to the life of Lana Turner.

We find these women writing romance novels under pseudonyms (The Flower of My Secret) or playing the mothers of murderers in famous TV series (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), giving birth on public transport (Live Flesh) or dragging their husband’s corpse into a freezer (Volver). There are difficult mothers, disappearing daughters, dramatic women and disappointing men. There are doubles and substitutions: a little Hitchcock here, a little Highsmith there. ‘All my romances come out as noir,’ the novelist says in The Flower of My Secret. In the 1990s – his most confident decade – you could feel that happening to Almodóvar too, from High Heels (1991) to Live Flesh (1997).

At his best, Almodóvar has combined high melodrama with fiercely affecting pain. A lot of this comes from the actresses themselves rather than the scenarios. Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes, Carmen Maura, Penélope Cruz and other regulars have given their best performances through Almodóvar, operating in several registers at once. Rossy de Palma – who memorably passes out from drinking spiked gazpacho in Women on the Verge (1988) – has a cameo in Bitter Christmas as Elsa’s unbearable friend Gabriela. In All about My Mother, a nurse who oversees organ donations loses her own son and agrees to donate his heart: it’s a neat set-up, but the feeling in it comes from the compassion of Cecilia Roth in the role – and it’s only an Almodóvar movie when a famous actress, a transgender prostitute and a pregnant nun come in.

Somewhere along the line he eased up on his chequered plots and dizzying pace – ‘mambo taxis’ with leopard-print seats (Women on the Verge) gave way to accidents at sea (Julieta, 2016). If one tone has remained consistent it might be said to be carried by the voice of the Mexican ‘ranchera’ singer Chavela Vargas, whose song ‘Bitter Christmas’ gives his latest film its title. We’ve seen her in Almodóvar films before – rasping her heart out on a TV screen in a bar, for instance – but here the passionate cry of her voice and the curdled sweetness in her songs become a form of solace and a call to arms.

Raúl and Mónica’s argument has two parts. It begins at home and continues in a park over mezcal. In the second round, she lets him have it. Mónica plays the part here of Almodóvar’s superego: he can hear it, but in his character, Raúl, it only gives rise to further manipulation.

‘You’ve already made your best films,’ she tells him. ‘Now you can live off the prestige.’ She remarks on Raúl’s use of Vargas as a linking device: ‘It has the ring of something you’ve done before.’ She points out that Elsa and Beau are unconvincing as a couple. ‘I’ve heard you say many times that you’re afraid of repeating yourself,’ she says, ‘that if that time came you wouldn’t be complacent and would at least be self-aware. Well, that time has come.’ She suggests he cut the offensive parts of his script and sell a shorter version to Netflix. As a footnote, she adds: ‘You should really stop talking about your mother’s death. This is the second time.’

Mónica’s candour inspires a new thought in Raúl. As it comes to him there is a brightness in his gaze that Mónica has learned to recognise as the moment when an idea is really working – a look that fuses cruelty, creativity and madness. ‘You are the story, Mónica,’ he realises. ‘The capacity to be invisible and the capacity you’ve just shown to destroy me. Elsa will be based on you, and I will disappear.’ In other words, he will offer a narcissistic self-portrait through the vessel of her, exacerbating an already devastating gesture and obliterating her in the process. Every portrait is a self-portrait, all fiction is autofiction.

What is Almodóvar telling us? All these years of giving actresses the roles of a lifetime, of seeming to adore women and to understand them in all their complexity – have those years in fact been marred by vanity and theft? Fiction or non-fiction, he is at least more honest than his characters about the cost of art to others.

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