With its rich, warm, summery colours, nothing could surely be less bitter or less Christmassy than this film. It’s the latest from Cannes competition regular Pedro Almodóvar, partly set during Christmas; the female lead actually complains about the yuletide traffic at one stage. But there’s no tinsel or sleigh bells or shopping for presents. Like Die Hard, it eludes classification. It is another – which is to say, yet another – double-layered creation by Almodóvar, a kind of movie auto-metafiction of the sort that he has virtually invented, a life-v-art dialectical process that he is evidently unable to do without.
Like the recent Pain and Glory, Bitter Christmas is a candidly personal movie, circling around ideas like grief, loss, the vampirism of art and the betrayal involved in basing fictional characters on real people. Perhaps by emphasising this last point, Almodóvar is pre-empting or cauterising a crisis in his own life, showing us a gay male artist’s perspective on the question of whether women are not being given enough credit as the wellspring for inspiration or indeed as artists themselves. The result is a complex, slightly muddled, almost surreally modernist noir-melodrama or open-ended telenovela of the sort he habitually offers. Almodóvar always alchemises the real-unreal duality into something watchable, although perhaps he is going over old ground. Bitter Christmas, incidentally, features what for arthouse movies is becoming mandatory, the haughty anti-Netflix gag, even though the film does feel like streaming TV in some ways.
In the mid-2000s, an era of fliptop phones, Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) is a struggling indie film-maker now reduced to shooting TV ads; her younger boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado) is a firefighter and part-time lapdancer whom she met at a club on a hen night when she went backstage to offer him the lead in her upcoming underpants commercial. Elsa, and maybe Almodóvar himself, are unmoved by the fact that this would be tricky behaviour if the gender roles were reversed. Elsa has friends who are plagued with problems: Patricia (Victoria Luengo) has to deal with a young son while her husband is away on business trips where he is cheating on her, and Natalia (played by Milena Smit, from Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers) is profoundly depressed by the loss of her young son. And Elsa herself is depressed, struggling with a new autobiographical script and stricken with psychosomatic migraines and panic attacks after the death of her mother. Having fallen out with Patricia, Elsa shares a holiday villa in Lanzarote with Natalia where her artistic vision and relationship with the absent Bonifacio comes to a crisis.
But all this is being imagined in the present day by a grey-haired film director called Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who is working on an autobiographical script of his own called Bitter Christmas; Elsa would appear to be a version of him while his boyfriend Santi (Quim Gutiérrez) is clearly the model for Bonifacio. But the entire action of the film seems to be projected from the complex relationship with his friend and producing partner Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), who is leaving him at a difficult time for a three-month sabbatical to be with her friend Elena whose son is desperately ill. Mónica is furious with Raúl for effectively fictionalising this last situation in his script, an eruption of rage which feels almost dreamlike in its unreality. Almodóvar’s iconic repertory regular Rossy de Palma makes an appearance as Elsa’s other friend Gabriela. And all this head-spinning complexity is anchored, as so often in Almodóvar’s work, by a passionate musical moment: Mexican singer Chavela Vargas performs a folk song about the Medea-like figure of La Llorona, or The Weeping Woman.
What we are perhaps leading to is an epiphany of truth for Raúl as artist and friend. Elsa is not based on him; he, Raúl, is not the centre of things. In fact, Elsa is his friend and ally Mónica, whom he has been taking for granted. That is the real parallel and it is Mónica’s feelings and Mónica’s identity who should be the central inspiration of his script and indeed the central point of his life right now. This is the enlightenment which he arguably approaches when he continues his script past the “The End” of the first draft, as Elsa appears to be coming to terms with her mother’s parting.
But as so often in the past with Almodóvar, there is something unfinished in the film, an open-endedness which is partly frustrating, partly intriguing: a response to the open-endedness and unknowability of life itself, perhaps. I confess that, for me, this movie doesn’t have the impact of his comparably modernist Parallel Mothers, but Almodóvar’s sensual, playful, melancholy films are always food for thought and feeling.