THE WAY HE WAS
Spanish director Almodóvar plays with memory to tell a personal tale
PAIN AND GLORY
★★ ★ ★ out of 5
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz,
Asier Etxeandia
Director: Pedro Almodóvar Duration: 1 h 53 m
Pedro Almodóvar turned 70 last month, and his newest work finds the filmmaker in a beautifully contemplative mood.
Pain and Glory is the story of a Spanish director named Salvador Mallo, an almost-anagram of the director’s last name, and played by his longtime collaborator Antonio Banderas.
Any similarities to Almodóvar’s life are intentional — except when they’re not. Banderas sports a very Almodóvarian haircut and lives in a Madrid apartment that was apparently a copy of the director’s own home. But he also tries heroin on a whim and quickly develops an addiction — something Almodóvar says he knows about only at second hand.
The story sweeps forward on parallel tracks. In one, nineyear-old Salvador (Asier Flores) is growing up in rural Spain, steered toward the priesthood by a pragmatic mother played by (who else?) Penélope Cruz. Julieta Serrano plays the same woman in old age. Almodóvar could have called this one All About My Mother, if he hadn’t already used that title himself.
The present-day story also finds Salvador beset by doubts, writer’s block and the aches and pains of this mortal coil. He too is in a melancholy, nostalgic mood — a cinema is showing a movie he made 30 years earlier and he tentatively reaches out to his lead actor from that film, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), with whom he long ago had a falling out.
Together they discover what many a moviegoer has when revisiting an old favourite: “The film is the same,” says Alberto. “It’s your eyes that have changed.”
A combination of licit and illicit drugs transports Salvador back to his childhood, where the young filmmaker-to-be feels the first stirrings of desire while watching a local labourer washing.
Later, a reminder of that moment will wash up on Salvador’s shore like a bottle tossed into the sea of memory. And his reconciliation with Alberto convinces him to give the actor a monologue he has written, titled Addiction. Alberto’s performance of the work will in turn lead to another chance encounter with a figure from Salvador’s past.
Movies pile on coincidences at their peril — there will always be a breaking point. Pain and Glory manages to avoid the trap because the storytelling flows so naturally that what might sound like coincidence on paper plays out as inevitable on the screen. Besides, Salvador’s existence has been mostly devoid of such moments. It’s as though all the quirks of fate chose to arrive at one moment in his life, a reunion of happenstance.
It’s a mellifluous, touching story right up to the final shot, a clever reveal that brings the past and the present back together. If he never produced another frame of film, this could serve as a fitting finale to Almodóvar’s career. As it is, I hope it merely serves as a signpost of what is yet to come.