Movie Review: Pain and Glory
I want movies that make me care. I want movies that make my soul ache and my mind long. Pedro Almodovar’s Pain and Glory is such a film. There are pleasures here, deep, sensual pleasures of the type that cannot be easily packaged and sold: the exquisite pang of first longings, the wandering reminiscences of lazy summer days, the warmness of seeing an estranged friend or lover again after many drifting years, the slow accumulation of lines and cares like trophies unwanted but eventually greatly valued. They are hard pleasures, and if that makes sense to you, you should see this film.
You should also see it for the performance of Antonio Banderas as fading director Salvador Mallo. In his heyday, he was a star, formerly an actor, now suffering from every kind of aging-related malady you can imagine. His aches and pains, both of body and mind, are elaborated on in an extended sequence using graphs and charts of the human body and its functions, the movie’s only use of semi-elaborate visuals. He lives in an apartment and is visited by friends and his housekeeper, but makes no films and encourages no serious connections. Most of the time that we hear his voice, it is narration: the inner thoughts of 50-some years of life. Like all memories, his jumps around: now, he’s a child on the banks of the river, watching his mother wash clothes. Now, his mother is elderly and near death and disappointed with him. Now, he’s a pre-teen having his first stirrings of sexual awakening. Biographies, however well-researched, can never truly capture memory, for they are by necessity linear; the mind moves too quickly for that.
Banderas made a brief Hollywood splash in the late ‘90’s and early 2000’s, popular more for his sex appeal than his acting chops, but like Mallo’s memory, that was only a small part of the story. He had gotten his start on a string of Almodovar films back in Spain, and when he left to seek “better” opportunities, it purportedly created a rift between the two friends. Almodovar has chosen an interesting way to address that in this film, as Banderas is essentially playing a version of the director himself. This does not call for the smouldering looks and confident swagger he displayed in his days as an action hero, but for silences, deep stares, nuanced expressions. Banderas was good in the big pictures---I particularly enjoyed the pulp fun of The Mask of Zorro---but here he displays what real acting is, when less, not more, is required.
The plot, such as there is, is that Mallo’s most famous film is being remastered and re-released, and the presenters want both him and lead actor Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia) to host the event. The issue is that Mallo hated Crespo’s performance, and the two have not spoken since the film released. This is mere background to get Mallo and Crespo together, which results in a series of creative fencing matches over heroin and alcohol. Mallo has been writing but not producing his work, and Crespo comes across a particularly enchanting self-confessional piece that he longs to perform on stage. The director has warned not to take this relationship too literally as representative of him and Banderas, but we can see it as at least representative of any battle of creative egos. Almodovar is being confessional not in the sense of a memoir, which is wise, because memoirs run the danger of coming across as being written by people who think too highly of themselves. Though Salvador’s apartment is actually Almodovar’s own Madrid home, this was apparently as much for ease of filming as to draw personal connections; whether you believe that and what you make of the choice is entirely up to you.
It would not be an Almodovar film if women, and the relationship between them and men, were not front-and-center. Mallo’s mother Jacinta, played in youth by Penelope Cruz and old age by Julieta Serrano, is a far greater force in his life than his meek and retiring father (Raul Arevalo). They live in a decently furnished cave in the village of Paterna, which is compared by a pious character to the way early Christians used to live. This is of little comfort to Jacinta, who worries over Salvador’s education and the family’s low social status. She isn’t the sort of woman whose worries take the form of traditionally feminine hand-wringing, instead delivering her admonishments, hopes and approvals alike as if they were populist sermons. Even through old age, she retains her fire, though she becomes less sympathetic. Older Jacinta is the kind of person who is used to being critical in order to improve her son’s life, yet doesn’t know how to stop or change after what he needs is comfort. These memories mostly involve real, relatively plain locations, shot in sumptuous detail by the highly awarded Jose Luis Alcaine, who has worked with Almodovar before and here takes the caves of Paterna and the paintings on the walls of Almodovar’s home and turns them into quiet beauty. The camera rarely lingers, because it doesn’t need to; the sense of Salvador fading even while surrounded by beauty is palpable, and the hypnotic score by Alberto Iglesias weaves its way through everything.
Two loves also form Salvador’s life, one chaste and one very much not. The first is Eduardo (Cesar Vicente), a laborer who the learned Salvador tutors as a child for extra money. This is the chaste one, as the labourer and his muscles awaken the pre-teen’s sexuality; they later connect indirectly as adults in one of the film’s more mystical plotlines. The second is Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the first love of adult Salvador’s life. The way they reconnect I will not reveal here, but their story, and the scenes they share together, have the inexorable pull of true emotions. Yes, it also features Banderas and Sbaraglia sharing a much-discussed passionate kiss, one that feels true and rare enough in film, but the scene is not about that alone---it creates real closeness, a sense that these two people were important to each other in ways we will never fully grasp.
A film like this is a pleasure, not because it presses buttons a committee of marketers wants it to press, but because it is simultaneously about Almodovar and the people in his life and about everyone watching. It is about the audience not because you will have had the same experiences, but because it is about humanity and the bonds we form, ones that ebb and flow and last, ones that nevertheless can be better communicated in a single glance than in an entire film. Yet how glad we are that Almodovar has done just that.
Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.
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