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14 Aug 26
Director Release Date |
Starring Bárbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Victoria Luengo, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón |
Certificate Running Time |
It is perhaps Pedro Almodóvar's most intimate, nakedly candid film to date, drawing on his distinguished history as a screenwriter and filmmaker.
Selected for this year's Cannes Film Festival, it has drawn rave reviews following its premiere in Spain ("a masterpiece," announced the influential newspaper El Mundo) and looks set to wow critics and audiences here.
If you really want to know and understand Pedro Almodóvar, you have to see Bitter Christmas.
Like Broken Embraces and Pain And Glory before it, Bitter Christmas revolves around a Pedro proxy: a celebrated director named Raúl Durán (Argentina's Leonardo Sbaraglia) who's having trouble with his latest screenplay. The script he's working on, the "Bitter Christmas" of the title, tells of another creative, advertising director Elsa, who, having recently lost her mother over the Yuletide period, takes a restorative trip to Lanzarote with a friend who has her own reasons for getting away from it all.
Elsa's story unfolds as a film within a film that runs parallel with Raui's narrative, a deft mix of fiction and reality that allows Almodóvar to muse on the nature of creation and its impact on the psyche.
Lest things get too metatextual, though, the filmmaker finds space for his trademark fun and flamboyance, thanks in part to a fireman beau of Elsa's (Patrick Criado) who moonlights as a stripper. Look out too for Rossy de Palma, an Almodóvar staple who has been a fixture of his oeuvre since 1987's Law Of Desire.
"It's a film that turns against itself," Almodóvar says of an autofiction he describes as his "most Bergmanesque" to date. "I wanted to shake a little the totemic figure of a director [and] question whether he has the right to do everything he does."
Inspired in part by his memories of having a panic attack and a short story he wrote in 2003, it's clear Bitter Christmas constitutes an intensely personal statement from a daring provocateur who has been thrilling and delighting audiences for nigh on 50 years.
Overall it's another must-see from a perennial Picturehouse favourite. 
Neil Smith
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