Almodóvar provides a clear and powerful insight into the creative experience

En Amarga Navidad This intuition becomes radicalized. The duel between the mother—a dramatic point of departure—functions less as a narrative conflict than as a trigger for reflection that expands more on the way stories are constructed to to domesticate a traumatic experience.

Acaso most fascinating Amarga Navidad It is like the characters of fiction within fiction, as the protagonist Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) – a public director who arose from the imagination of the film director, Raúl Durán (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who once upon a time arose from the imagination of Almodóvar – apparently more alive, more complete, more intense that your own creators. In this context, the film opens with a scene of bicephaly as well as a spectacular poster of the film.

Hay en Amarga Navidad awareness of artificiality which conveys the whole story. Almodóvar has never hidden his fascination with classic melodrama, but here that dialogue becomes more reflexive, utterly metafictional. The film seems to be wondering what happens when the structures and dramatic fodder of melodrama are opened in the canal to deliver in the last instance: self-reported confession cases around struggle, guilt and creative experience as a therapeutic tool. It’s a film that grows and grows during and after watching it.

Elsa tries to survive the fight by taking refuge in the workplace, and in this refuge she gradually grows distant from her sidekick Beau, a truly charming ‘stripper bomber’ played by Patrick Criado. In parallel, the figure of Durán appears, a cinema director in crisis, whose presence gives shape to the device a cinema within a cinema – a recurring motif in Almodovar filmography – which here requires an essayistic dimension.

The figure works like a charm alter ego Not so much Almodóvar’s own words, someone who faces the inevitable question of all authors who have built such a recognizable universe: what is the question of when you encountered all these cases? Where does the inspiration come from?

The film does not respond to this request explicitly, but seems to suggest a possible solution: to steal the lives of others. Almodóvar apuesta por fragmentary relationshipwhere the experience is organized around episodes, jumps in time (los flashback that the director writes and that he is guided by Elsa’s memories and spatial development with the final destination in Lanzarote, as happened in Round arms (2009).

On this continuous journey and evolution (sometimes orthopedic, sometimes very organic), through physical structures assembled with architectural mastery of construction and assembly, the viewer participates in their own experience of creation. In this sense, the result is priceless.

What other film tells the same story with such clarity and vehemence? Through the great figure of Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), he gets him into an unforgettable final plot in the manner of a double epilogue, in which Durán (or Almodóvar similarly) questions the creative legitimacy of characters who unexpectedly disappear or appear in the plot, or They are “Almodovarian” moments of humor and music (here played by Rossa de Palma and Amaio Romero emoting with Chavela Vargas) that seem to belong in another film, but always contain a hint of transcendence.

Amarga Navidad it confirms what you understood in the director’s last works: about progressive approximation a completely self-aware form of cinema. It’s not just about telling stories, but about thinking through them about your own cinema and of course listening to the Manchego filmmaker’s own emotions and spirits.

Evidently the message of es reflection on the relationship between life and fictionbut on the level of sophistication (and one might say on the level of honesty) abrumador. For Almodóvar, cinematography was a form of reorganization of the chaos of experience, but even here there is a suspicion that this gesture may prove insufficient.

The tone of twilight does not affect the feeling of the journey until the gaze that reflects on one’s own journey a mixture of clarity, melancholy and guilthow it happens Pain and glory (2019), which we suspect this movie is like a spin-off. Cinema continues to be a refuge, but it is also a place to observe the fragility of that refuge.

What you end up asking is a film that seems as much about the fight as it is about the shoot itself. Shadow from where melodrama is transformed into thought and where autobiography differs from fiction so he could be a peasant. Sometimes it’s exactly where Amarga Navidad It is a real dimension: in the intuition that cinema, like memory, is always an imperfect way of combating pain and glory.