Last evening (Tuesday, 5.19) I saw Pedro Almodovar‘s Bitter Christmas in the Salle Bazin, and in the immediate wake of the moaning man incident, I was saying to myself “this new Pedro movie is obviously thin gruel, but at least it’s not the cinematic equivalent of a 60ish frizzy-haired guy dying in his theatre seat.”
For in the usual Pedro style it’s vibrantly colored, emotionally sincere (the performances by Barbara Lennie and Leonardo Sbaraglia are the most compelling), cleanly written and generally well-ordered in terms of editing, production design and musical score. These in themselves are comforting elements, especially when there’s not much else going on.
I am telling you straight and true and with no small amount of attendant cruelty (and I take zero pleasure from saying this about a filmmaker I’ve dearly loved for many decades) that Bitter Christmas is the cinematic equivalent of Randy Newman‘s “I’m Dead and I Don’t Know It.” Pedro to fans: “I have nothing left to say, but I’m gonna say it anyway.”
Bitter Christmas is a movie that is so tangled up in itself you quickly feel lost in a house of mirrors and detours…a script within a script within the head of someone else as they look back upon 2004 while borrowing (i.e., stealing) from the misfortunes of friends and loved ones…l don’t even know what I’m talking about here…Bitter Christmas is basically Pedro’s “Whose Story is This Anyway?”
I for one didn’t care whose story it is. Because the sum of all the threads and tangents simply weren’t adding up. The film feels like an accumulation of vaguely melancholy scenes about some vaguely melancholy characters rather a single compelling narrative that (a) knows itself and (b) knows where it’s going, and (c) skillfully puts the hook in and leads you along.
The original Spanish title is Amarga Navidad, but the French title is Autofiction. Does that tell you anything?
Tell me if this Wiki rundown adds up for you: “Set in a timeline in 2025 but largely taking place in 2004, the plot explores how filmmaker Raúl (Sbaraglia), an Almodovar stand-in in the same fashion that Antonio Banderas played a Pedro-resembling character in Pain and Glory, writes a screenplay that turns out to be the story of Elsa (Lennie), Raúl’s alter ego. Raúl immerses himself in autofiction to overcome his writer’s block, and draws inspiration from his own life, his celibate boyfriend Santi and his assistant Mónica.”
Right away you’re going “good God, what is this…?”
Newman: “I always thought that I would know / When it was time to quit / When I lost a step or two or three or four or five I’d notice it / But now that I’ve arrived here safely / I find my talent has gone / Why do I go on and on and on and on and on and on? And on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on? And on and on and on and on?”
Nobody ever said art was easy. It’s most certainly not. But you know what Pedro needs to do going forward? Stop making autofiction movies about himself and find a good catchy screenplay or adapt a good novel and then weave his personal stuff into the narrative, just like Alfred Hitchcock threaded his pervy ice-blonde obsession along with his control-freak personality into James Stewart‘s Scotty Ferguson in Vertigo. That’s the way out of this thicket.
Sidenote: If I was going to suddenly become gay, I would like this sexual transformation to happen with an Almodovar movie. Because Pedro films are so ripe and delicious and soothing to the soul. I couldn’t be a bottom, but that goes without saying. Nor could I be a top, as the smell of shit is deeply unpleasant. Nor could I blow anyone. But I could at least pretend to be gay.