My wife and I see a lot of movies. This week, attending the
Mill Valley Film Festival, we’ve seen way more than usual: six films so far, with
another five slated for this coming weekend. So we can sometimes get a bit
jaded. Pain and Glory, writer-director Pedro Almodóvar’s latest picture (his first since Julieta three
years ago) was shown at MVFF a couple days ago, but we were able watch a
pre-release “screener” of the film at home instead. As the movie concluded and the credits began
to roll, I turned to my wife, who looked at me and exclaimed with delight, Oh
my god, that was great! She was
absolutely right; I felt exactly the same. If you have ever seen a motion picture that
left you joyously exhilarated from the sheer pleasure of the experience, you’ll
understand how we felt.
Pain and Glory is simply a brilliant movie. It’s
so good, I’m not sure where to start, but let’s begin with how it looks. It is
a beautiful film to watch - an absolute visual delight. Artfully constructed and even poetic at times in
its imagery and dialogue; the story is evocative, emotionally honest and
insightful. It is about the pain (physical and psychic) and glories of
one man’s life, yet with a universality that reflects on aspects of ours as
well. It is also a fascinatingly open, remarkably personal look inside the
director’s heart and soul – or at least so it feels. While fictionalized, it is
a largely autobiographical picture in much the same way that Fellini’s Amarcord was. Scenes at the protagonist’s home, in fact, were actually shot at Almodóvar’s house. His hair style was intentionally made to resemble
Almodóvar’s.
Pain and Glory also features marvelous acting
by a superb cast, headed by Antonio Banderas as the protagonist, cinema auteur
Salvador Mallo, in what has been called the best performance of his career. Before we go there, however, a little context:
Salvador is an acclaimed and successful Spanish film director
in his late fifties. As we learn in an early voiceover, he has accumulated a
variety of ailments over the years – migraines and cluster headaches, anxiety,
depression and, worst of all, debilitating sciatica - all of which taken
together have brought his creative life to a standstill: his pain is so great he
can neither write nor direct. A solitary man whose entire life has been devoted
to filmmaking, if he can’t work, he feels his life no longer has any meaning.
What he does have is plenty of time to think. And so, his
introspective mind turns to key people and nodal moments in his past. The first
key person, as one might expect, is his mother, Jacinta, who appears in a
series of flashbacks, the first of which is to the 1960s, a pivotal period in
Salvador’s childhood, when he is just nine years old. We first meet Jacinta - played
by a luminous, beautiful, earthy and maternal Penelope Cruz – as she is washing
the bedlinens and such-like in the river with some other women. Little Salvador
happily splashes in the water and watches as his mom and the other women
gracefully fluff out the clean white sheets, then spread them on nearby reeds
to dry, all the while happily singing an acapella song. It’s a flat-out
luscious cinematic tableau for us – and a fond memory for Salvador of the time just
before things got complicated – before he first learns that he and his family
are poor, before the decision is made to send him off to a seminary school, and
before he discovers, in the person of a handsome young laborer who was working
in their crude home, what Almodóvar calls The First Desire – his first sexual feeling towards another male (another quite lovely scene, by the way).
Sometime later, Salvador’s thoughts drift back to more
recent times and to a much older Jacinta in her declining years – now played by
the terrific Julieta Serrano. Old Jacinta talks to her now mid-fifties son
about her faith, her disappointments and - in a remarkably frank and open way -
about her impending demise and burial wishes. She tells her son to be sure not to let them
tie her feet together in the casket (as is or was customary) because ”the place
I am going, I want to go in very lightly.” 
Another critical and formative
time in Salvador’s thoughts is the early 1980’s in fervid, post-Franco Madrid, when
he was an ambitious young man with creativity bubbling over into numerous projects
and his career beginning to truly take off. It was also when he entered into a passionate,
romantic relationship with a beautiful but troubled young man, Federico – a
relationship filled with equal measures of happiness and pain, and which eventually
breaks his heart. In a brilliant move, this story is not told via cinematic
flashback but rather in a theatrical presentation of a barely fictionalized
first-person narrative Salvador had written. He had meant it to purge his mind of the painful memory by writing it down; but the story is taken up by the actor Alberto (Asier Etxeandea) and turned into a compelling, arresting monologue. (Yet another strikingly beautiful moment – visually and dramatically - in Pain and Glory.)
In addition to these various backward glances, there is of
course the story of Salvador’s present. How he wrestles with his demons - physical,
psychological, philosophical - and finds the means and the will to move
forward. All of this comes off as both
absorbing and convincing, thanks to the fabulous work of Antonio Banderas as
Salvador. It’s a performance that is rich in subtlety – reflecting despair and
hope, quiet helplessness and deep wisdom, weakness and power, melancholy and
optimism, anger and love, and an abiding loneliness. Banderas won the best actor
prize at Cannes and is, in my book, a leading candidate for that honor at the
Oscars and other award programs.
None of this palaver does Pain and Glory
justice. As Jafar Panahi noted in his wonderful movie This Is Not A Film (2011): “If we can tell a film, why make a
film?” Written words simply will not suffice. Seeing is believing. And take my word for it, this is great cinema, one of the best movies of the year. If you
are already an Almodóvar fan, I’ll just say that this picture – more
mature and less flamboyant in some ways
than his earlier work – ranks with his absolute best. If you are not familiar
with Almodóvar, but you love movies (and aren’t limited
to plot-driven action-packed Hollywood
stuff), you owe it to yourself to check out Pain and Glory.
113 minutes. Rated R [a bit of male nudity will do it
every time, no female nudity, no sex, no serious profanity)
In
Spanish with English subtitles.
Grade: A
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