Almodóvar’s film about a director who cannot finish a script about a director is handsome, often funny and honest about its maker. It is also slack through the middle and keeps nearly everything it has to say for the last half hour. Bárbara Lennie carries it.
Pedro Almodóvar has made a film about a director who is writing a film about a director, and he has cast himself, in all but name, as the one holding the pen. Raúl Durán (Leonardo Sbaraglia) cannot finish his screenplay. He rewrites it, doubts it, and reaches into a grieving woman’s life for the material he needs. Almodóvar has done this before, most directly in Pain and Glory (2019), and he knows we know. Bitter Christmas is handsome, often funny and honest about its maker’s failings; it is also slack for a long stretch in the middle, and it saves nearly everything it has to say for the final half hour.
The best of it belongs to Bárbara Lennie. Elsa has lost her mother (Gloria Muñoz) at Christmas, and Lennie plays the weeks after as a woman going through the motions with great care, so that nobody around her has to worry. Carmen Machi has one scene as a doctor and gets more out of it than the script hands her. Rossy de Palma, as Gabriela, walks in and the temperature rises a degree or two, as it has in Almodóvar’s films since the 1980s. Patrick Criado, as the young man called Beau, is loose and amused where everyone else is fretting.
Antxón Gómez builds the rooms in the colours Almodóvar has always liked, reds and greens and blues that no real flat would dare, and Pau Esteve Birba lights them so that the people look slightly more alive than the furniture, which is the right way round. Paco Delgado’s costumes are chosen to sit inside those rooms rather than against them. Teresa Font cuts between the two eras cleanly enough that we always knew where we were; the trouble is that we did not always know why we had moved. Alberto Iglesias’s score is lush and full of strings, and in the quietest scenes it pushes where the picture wanted to be left alone.
The trouble is the frame. Every time Raúl sits down at his desk the film stops being about a woman and her dead mother and starts being about whether a man should write about a woman and her dead mother. That is a real question and Almodóvar means it, but he asks it in dialogue, repeatedly, and for the middle hour the asking replaces the drama. The tagline, “You’re confusing fiction with reality”, is the whole subject in six words, and the script never quite trusts us to have got it.
Here is what we felt. Somewhere past the hour we were bored, and mildly cross about it, because the people on screen were good company and the film kept interrupting them to explain what it was doing with them. Then a Chavela Vargas song arrives, and we were caught off guard and moved, more than the preceding hour had any right to expect. For the length of that song the two stories are in the same feeling, and the film is what it wanted to be all along. It does not last, but the last half hour that follows is far better than what came before, and the self-criticism, when it finally lands, is sharp and aimed squarely at the man behind the camera.
Against his own record this sits below Pain and Glory, which turned self-examination into a story with a shape, and well below Parallel Mothers (2021), which had no interest in the director at all and was the better for it. In construction it is closer to Bad Education (2004), but without the menace. The confession here is sincere; what is missing is a reason for anyone who is not Almodóvar to care about it before the last act. Most critics have been a little warmer than we are, and we understand why: spending time in these rooms with these people is no hardship.
For the faithful, and there are many of us, this is worth the evening: 111 minutes, a 15 certificate, subtitled, with one great performance and one great song. For everyone else, watch the mother and the daughter and forgive the man at the desk when he interrupts. He gets to the point in the end.
