Beautifully crafted memory maze
Time has been a benevolent mistress to two-time Oscar winner Pedro Almodovar.
The Spanish writer-director has mellowed with age and honed his craft behind the camera with tenderly observed character studies including All About My Mother and Talk To Her.
That personal touch serves him well in his self-reflective latest feature, Pain & Glory, a beautifully calibrated semi-autobiographical memory maze which reunites Almodovar with leading man Antonio Banderas.
The ravages of time on the body and mind are a central theme in Almodovar’s script, which artfully stitches together key moments from a film director’s life as he prepares to go under a surgeon’s scalpel.
Banderas delivers one of his most compelling performances, peeling back layers of regret and despair from a man in physical agony who has temporarily forgotten the unabashed love of art and humanity instilled in him by his spirited mother.
Almodovar draws on personal experience (pivotal scenes were shot in his real-life apartment) to inform the lead character’s journey to calling a truce with his past.
The best days of filmmaker Salvador Mallo (Banderas) are behind him as he stumbles through middle age with crippling back pain.
When a local cinema screens one of his most celebrated films, Salvador nervously extends the hand of friendship to its handsome star, Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia).
Salvador and Alberto’s awkward reunion, eased by the inhalation of heroin fumes, sparks memories of a childhood in Paterna, where nineyear-old Salvador (Asier Flores) orbited mum Jacinta (Penelope Cruz).
Pain & Glory is galvanised by Banderas’s understated yet powerful central performance.
Every inch of his body seems to thrum with anguish as he pieces together a mosaic of reminiscence to the swooning strains of composer Alberto Iglesias’s orchestral score.
Past and present entwine like long-lost lovers in Almodovar’s script, which reaches an emotional crescendo with a tender exchange between Salvador and his married old flame (Leonardo Sbaraglia).
The human body may falter, sometimes catastrophically, but love never dies.