REVIEW: Pedro Almodóvar's Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad)

This review was originally published by The Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.” The Jean Renoir quote captures the way many auteurs, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar included, seem to chip away at the same ideas and themes over and over again. His entertaining new melodrama, Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad), is clearly carved from the same marble as his other globally acclaimed works. 

Add to this the irony that celebrity can reduce a person’s physical world at the same time it expands their global reputation, as Almodóvar himself has acknowledged in interviews, and you may approach an explanation for why his films feel both increasingly centered around his own individual experience and immediately recognizable to viewers around the world. 

Bitter Christmas is just such a package. The film is widely expected to premiere internationally at Cannes, but since its March 20 release in Spain it has sparked debate about the role of autobiography in the director's films – and creative works in general. That is entirely the movie’s point. 

Leonardo Sbaraglia (co-star of the also semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory) stars as Raúl Durán, a version of the auteur – an aging film director in a creative slump yet still peppered with international awards, tributes and lucrative invitations. His assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijon, who has a riveting monologue in 2021’s Parallel Mothers), quits in an early scene to care for her partner Elena, who has fallen into a deep depression following the death of her son. 

But we don’t meet Elena or know her story until much later in the film. Instead, we’re introduced to Elsa (a mesmerizing Bárbara Lennie), a filmmaker with two “cult” films to her credit and a career in advertising (“cult,” we’re told in a funny exchange, means just a few people liked it). Elsa is dating the strapping and good-natured fireman-slash-stripper Beau (a genial Patrick Criado), but she’s suffering from migraines and begins experiencing panic attacks on the one-year anniversary of her mother’s death. 

On doctor’s advice, she takes a restorative trip to the Canary Island of Lanzarote with her friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo, who had a small role in The Room Next Door). Patricia has just discovered that her husband is cheating on her, and Elsa feels strongly that he’s no good for her. Later, Elsa invites her depressed friend Natalia (Milena Smit, co-star of Parallel Mothers) to join her on the volcanic island. 

It takes a minute before you realize that the movie you’re watching about Elsa and friends is actually the film Raúl is writing. And thus begins a circular tale of filmmakers appropriating from reality to create fiction, which in turn provides a window into real life. More than one scene involves arguments about this creative process, as in a rousing climactic confrontation in which Mónica accuses Raúl of ‘vampirism.’ In response, with a gleam in his eye, Raúl scraps his original script and starts a rewrite – inspired by Mónica.

Bitter Christmas could have, and maybe should have, ended right here. Almodóvar has managed to evoke surprising tension out of the writing process in a montage that includes a blinking cursor on a blank screen. There’s also an earlier moment in the film where the words “FIN” (end) appear. Elsa’s story has ended, at least in Raúl’s first draft, but you’re only about two-thirds into the film you’re actually watching. 

It’s all very meta and diverting, if you’re willing to go along for the ride. The advanced-age audience at the Madrid theater where I saw the film at an early evening screening last Friday seemed to be enjoying the ride, though I was surprised by how little they laughed. This film is lighter than others in Almodóvar’s recent oeuvre and has some comedic moments that I found very funny. His appreciation for the male physique, a welcome flipping of cinema’s traditional male gaze, could make some viewers uncomfortable.

Everything is reminiscent – all part of Almodóvar’s “one movie” – the themes, actors, color palette, settings, music, framing, references and more. And some scenes and characters in Bitter Christmas feel directly plucked from earlier films. Compare Lennie’s Elsa in sunglasses and Hollywood waves with Angela Molina at the cemetery in Live Flesh, or her red dress with Marisa Paredes’ iconic look in The Flower of My Secret. When Elsa offers to feed her dying mother, you might flash to Antonio Banderas tenderly assisting his elderly mother in Pain and Glory – or the dead/dying mothers in Volver, All About My Mother and more. Sbaraglia, meanwhile, channels Banderas channeling Almodóvar, who is also in Elsa’s DNA.

It's not easy to write originally about Almodóvar’s movies either, compounded by the fact that he curates intricately designed packages around his premieres, from detailed production notes and omnipresent interviews to winking symbolism, easter eggs and self-aware dialogues. Still, in Spain, he enlivens debate. Christmas landed third at the Spanish box office on its opening weekend, with close to 100,000 tickets sold. 

There’s at least one well-known local critic who pans Almodóvar’s every film, to the point that it’s become part of the premiere experience here. Another price of fame, or maybe prolonged familiarity. At this stage – well into the maestro’s fifth decade of cinema – it’s fair to conclude that you either like Almodóvar's movies (his “one movie”), or you don’t. 

I do, and I liked this one more than others.

---

 Images courtesy of Warner Bros.