Review: Pain and Glory (2019)

At its most basic level, Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory is a good reminder of Antonio Banderas’s enormous talents as an actor. But if you’re already a fan of Almodóvar’s, the film’s abundant pleasures go even deeper than that. In many ways, it’s a typical work of European autofiction. The main character is a naked stand-in for the filmmaker, and the loose plot is merely a blank canvas upon which said character can reflect on his past, mistakes and all. And yet, despite its similarities to so many navel-gazing arthouse pictures, Pain and Glory is heartfelt and wise, ignoring most of the self-aggrandizement that is common in films of this sort. It also demonstrates Almodovar’s skill at adding texture to his filmmaking, whether through the visual style or the emotional cadence of a scene. Nothing is flat; nothing is cynical. In Pain and Glory, every lived moment of a life, whether full of grace or despair, is a work of art.

The film follows Banderas’s recently-retired film director, Salvador Mallo, who is Almodóvar in everything but name. We flit between his past, when he was a small boy (Asier Flores) in a white-washed village with his mother (Penélope Cruz), and his present, where he nurses his failing body and ruminates on his future as an artist. The film is structured around little portraits of his current life and how they connect to a formative moment in his past. For instance, we watch him reconnect with an actor he used to work with, Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), take up a heroin habit to deal with his back pain, and share a quiet evening with an old lover. In the flashbacks, we watch him clash with his mother as well as the awakening of his homosexuality.

The entire approach is constructed and self-aware in that manner particular to European arthouse films, whether Fellini’s 8 1/2 or Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series. However, Pain and Glory lacks the overwhelming artifice of the former and the self-effacement of the later. Almodóvar is reflecting on his own place in the world and analyzing his formative impulses, but he is not masking self-praise in a sheen of false self-aggrandizement. The film is rarely critical of Salvador, but it’s also rarely celebratory of him. He’s never allowed to be too clever or too talented or too pitiful, as if the entire film is merely a means for the filmmaker to redirect pathos onto himself. And Almodóvar never uses the narrative as a means of playing out past events in ways more sympathetic to himself; the film avoids the therapeutic pitfalls of autofiction, in that sense.

Instead, Pain and Glory uses the self-consciousness of the autobiographical conceit to extend grace to everyone involved in Salvador’s (and by extension, Almodóvar’s) life. This is most obvious in the film’s two standout scenes, which are intimately connected one to the other. In the first, we watch as Alberto performs a one-man show, ghostwritten by Salvador, about a former relationship. Alberto recounts the pain of the relationship, the struggle to overcome addiction, and the birth of his interest in cinema. The scene is an encapsulation of the film in miniature: an artistic recreation and processing of life’s pain and glory.

But it doesn’t end there. One of the audience members happens to be Salvador’s former lover, Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), and he reconnects with Salvador after the show. They have drinks in Salvador’s home and catch up on what happened in their lives since they departed. The scene is not about missed opportunities; Salvador and Federico mention their desire to sleep together, but they never pursue it. Instead, they come to terms with each other’s lives and individualities, extending grace one to the other. It’s a tender scene, almost overwhelmingly moving in the way that it paints the characters with warmth and conveys the bridge between their shared past and their individual presents. It ends with a lovely shot of Banderas bidding Federico farewell at his door. Banderas looks almost straight into the camera, smiles, and offers heartfelt thanks. It’s an artificial moment—Almodóvar is clearly speaking to us through Salvador—but also tender and sincere. It’s an example of how Banderas’s charm and warmth as a performer is essential to Almodóvar’s approach. The sincere gratitude overwhelms whatever objective distance the formal approach creates. It obliterates the barriers between memory and experience, artist and viewer.

This shot is indicative of Almodóvar’s entire approach in Pain and Glory. It captures Banderas’s considerable range and hard-to-match warmth as a performer. It showcases the texture of Almodóvar’s cinematography, which overcomes the flattening sheen of digital photography, instead using it to boldly express the colours of the apartment and Salvador’s own clothes. Most importantly, it is upfront about the constructed nature of the entire narrative—the way that the film is an artificial exercise that allows Almodóvar to be honest about his life through the method of cinematic storytelling.

Pain and Glory is a film of such moments of startling beauty and sincere artifice.

8 out of 10

Pain and Glory (2019, Spain)

Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar; starring Antonio Banderas, Asier Etxeandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Nora Navas, Julieta Serrano, Penélope Cruz, Asier Flores.