NYFF64 Diary, Day 4 ~ More TK @ da Movies

In short, Bitter Christmas is nothing new, and thank God for that.

The newest offering from Pedro Almodóvar follows a late-career director, Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), whose best years have to some extent passed him by—he's now in the period where he's more often giving talks at the Insituto Cervantes in L.A. or flying to collect a lifetime-achievement award from a queer film festival or turning down €200,000 grants from the Qatari film board instead of writing anything. His long-suffering assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) is retiring to tend to personal matters, and his boyfriend, Santi (Quim Gutiérrez) has been lulled into relational complacency. Raúl's lost his spark, and, desperate to make something, anything stick creatively, hungry for a new project to finally get off the ground, he turns to autofiction.

Most of the movie, therefore, takes place not with Raúl and Mónica and Santi in the present day, but back in 2004, where director Elena (Bárbara Lennie) struggles to balance her relationship with firefighter-cum-stripper Bonifcacio (Patrick Criado) and the emotional fallout of her friend Natalia's (Milena Smit) recent tragedy, while also writing an autofictional script to break through her writer's block after years of commercial directing. Elena gets chronic migraines and panic attacks and her friends are annoying, so she travels to Lanzarote and drinks wine and smokes too much and generally gets into emotional quandaries about the nature of friendship and her work, and of depicting her friendships in her work, especially when valences of tragedy raise their heads.

It's a little cheap of me to just say "it's an Almodóvar!" and move on, but, as I said, that's what it is. Almodóvar has built a career out of staging the plights of creative people in unfussy frames bursting with color, and this is no exception. His scripts since Pain and Glory have been concerned with the nature of artistry, history, personal trauma, and the interrelation of the three. Plots and characters breeze in and out. If there is a world outside of these kitchens and homes and villas and cars, it is not glimpsed, and barely remarked upon. None of this is new.

But, this does not detract from the experience of watching the man work. There is an airy brilliance to the Almodóvar formula, a tight-knit procession of themes and ideas that, while not revolutionary, are an altogether welcome sight on a festival calendar. The reds can always get redder. I have come to Almodóvar in his later period, in the part of his life where he repeats and revises and reimagines the arguments he has with himself, and I wait at the theatre door with a bowl in my hand and ask to be ladled another portion every so often, and Almodóvar obliges.

More tk,

Luis

Writing soundtrack