Inner vision
Banderas exquisite in Almodóvar’s quasi-autobiography ‘Pain and Glory’
“Don’t get that storyteller look,” film director Salvador Mallo’s elderly mother admonishes him at one point in “Pain and Glory.” It’s hard not to chuckle, because the character is a thinly veiled stand-in for Pedro Almodóvar himself — the film’s director, of course, but also one of the great storytellers in cinema today.
Mallo’s mother is telling her son that she doesn’t want to be fodder for his films. But as Almodóvar’s many fans well know, that’s impossible; the Spanish legend has used his late mother, his childhood, his craft, his sexuality and almost everything else about his life to make his brilliantly eclectic films over the decades.
And here, he’s doing it more than ever. Although significant parts are fictionalized, “Pain and Glory” is a deeply personal quasi-autobiography starring, happily for us, Antonio Banderas, Almodóvar’s longtime collaborator. Although Banderas