THE IMPISH LIFE OF AN AGED ENFANT TERRIBLE
Pain And Glory (15) Verdict: Director on the verge of a nervous breakdown ★★★★✩
PEDRO ALMODOVAR, the great Spanish director whose career highlights include Women On The Verge Of A nervous Breakdown, Tie Me up! Tie Me Down! and the Oscar-winning All About My Mother, has created a witty and painfully insightful film drawing on his memories as he enters his 70th year.
‘Cinema is my life, and my life is cinema,’ Almodovar once said. Here, in a purgatory between fiction and biography, a film director struggles to find his artistic mojo, lost to world weariness.
Antonio Banderas, one of Almodovar’s regulars, won best actor at Cannes for his portrayal of filmmaker Salvador Mallo in Pain And glory, sporting a white beard and an electric shock of hair that mimics the director’s own. Penélope Cruz, also a regular collaborator, plays the younger version of Jacinta, Mallo’s gorgeous mother.
The film will appeal to longtime fans of his, but it also stands alone as a memoir of a poverty-stricken, sun-drenched Catholic childhood, reflected upon by a man whose powers are waning.
The effect of the ailing body on the working mind is exposed in an amusing animated sequence showing Mallo’s gammy knee, creaking joints and difficulty swallowing.
Without painkillers, Mallo can barely function, and his addiction ramps up when he meets Alberto (Asier etxeandia), an actor from one of his old films. Their ancient feud dissolves when they smoke heroin together. (Almodovar denies this is autobiographical, though he has spoken of the toll heroin took on his generation.)
There follows a hilarious scene where the actor and director call in, stoned, to a cinema Q&A — but the incident also re-opens Mallo’s imagination.
His childhood home is in a white painted cave, where we see the whip-smart nineyear-old Mallo (played by Asier Flores) teaching a local builder to read. in return, the builder paints a watercolour of him, and also kindles his adoration of men.
The past revisits Mallo, too; as an old boyfriend returns with affection and regret, and his now aged mother (Julieta Serrano) berates him for his failures as a son — and explains, with relish, precisely how she would like to be laid out in death.
As always with Almodovar, each shot is carefully curated, from the rich reds and paintings in his apartment to the floral dresses worn by Cruz. everything is a paean to his art, even the outdoor village film shows projected onto a bedsheet.
‘The cinema of my childhood smells of pee and jasmine and a summer’s breeze,’ says Mallo.