Salvador Mallo is gay , has messy hair and has worked as a film director since young years. Although Pedro Almodóvar, like most good creators of art, has often dug where he stands, no film (not even Bad upbringing) has been as autofictive as this one. The fact that the couple horse Antonio Banderas plays the filmmaker's alter ego, Salavador Mallo, only makes the home-at-home feeling even stronger.
Salvador is a globally acclaimed director who has lost the desire for ... most of the time. Chronic pain in the back and soul, and a whole slew of other ailments, has in recent years kept him away from the film industry (though his doctor points out that he could probably direct anyway).
He is invited to the Cinematheque in Madrid to attend a screening of a restored copy of his 32-year-old breakthrough work Sabor, which causes Salvador to seek out its protagonist, whom he broke with after the film's premiere. Old growls and a sudden desire to use smoking heroin make the memories dance à la Smultron place in Salvador's tormented mind.
Pain and glory, which competed in Cannes last spring (Banderas won the prize for his efforts here), takes us by the hand and mumbles back in time. Recalls how it once began, for Salavador - and indirectly for Pedro Almodóvar himself; about how he went from punk filmmakers during the post-Franco era, over the kinky-six period of the 1980s, to becoming the global, broad audience's favorite favorites. Childhood and not least mother (Penélope Cruz), as is often the case with Almodóvar, get a lot of space.
“It cries so much all the time; the best actor is the one who struggles to hold back the tears, "says the Almodóvar clone Salvador, and thus speaks to his own role model, who has never been afraid to let the characters figure and act. But here he is - Almodóvar thus - more soberly withdrawn. Dimmed. Sure, it always offers bright colors and tricky relationships, but in essence, Pain and honor are more thoughtful and dimmed than we are used to. In fact, slightly depressing, like the film's filmmaker himself.
In a longor (which is not really that long but feels so) we sit and watch a one-man play that is important for the action, but just seems more cinematic than radio theater.
Paradoxically, the part of the film played in the nostalgic shimmer and bright colors of the rearview mirror is the most interesting, and vivid, although to say the least fragmentary. The present spins without real conflict. Except then, of course, the biggest of all the fights, the one against time, the one we will all lose - and the death anxiety that erodes the soul (the last bit I never thought I would write in a review of an Almodóvar movie) .
Well, now maybe you can imagine that Almodóvar is going Ingmar Bergman on our butts, but no, the film's feet are still on the comedy's ground, and the end offers a playful screw that lightens up and completes the meta circle.
Thus not one of his best but an Almodóvar is still ... an Almodóvar, although this time a stunned audience may well wait until the movie comes in streamed form.