Bitter Christmas review: 'sly and somewhat shallow'
Pedro Almodóvar’s take on the vampiric nature of artistic creation suffers by comparison to other films on the same theme, writes Alistair Harkness
Bitter Christmas (15) ★★★
“You’ve made your best films, now live off your prestige,” a character tells the veteran director who serves as the protagonist of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film Bitter Christmas. “It’ll be a minor film,” she goes on, “but your followers will be grateful.” Well, at least he knows.
As with Pain & Glory, his similarly minor film about filmmaking from 2019, Almodóvar’s latest finds the veteran Spanish auteur in self-reflexive mode with a sly and somewhat shallow slice of pseudo auto-fiction, this time revolving around an ageing gay filmmaker writing a movie that blurs the line between art and reality in ways liable to hurt those in his life.
For Raúl (Argentine actor Leonardo Sbaraglia) this is a small price to pay for the chance to make his first film in years. Having been in something of a creative rut writing books, making documentaries and touring the world’s film festivals accepting awards, he’s started writing a script about a cult director who has herself decided to make a new film after a creatively uninspiring period making commercials. As Raúl types away at his computer — his cursor shown in close-up, vibrating like a heartbeat — we see this film-within-the-film coming to life, with Bárbara Lennie as Raúl’s creative proxy Elsa. The problem is that Raúl is suffering from writer’s block, so Elsa's story (and all the supporting characters) seem to be going nowhere – until, that is, he decides to start writing in tragic details from his long-time assistant Mónica’s suddenly drama-filled life without her permission (Mónica is played by Aitana Sánchez-Gijón).
Almodovar dramatises the ethics of this in both the film and the film-within-the-film, which he also names Bitter Christmas after a song Raúl wants to feature in it. These nested storylines invariably comment on each other, letting Almodóvar have his cake and eat it without making any apologies for the vampiric nature of artistic creation.
It’s all very reminiscent of Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen’s much funnier, more acerbic, now 30-year-old take on the same artistic dilemma. It also suffers when compared to the the brain-noodling incisiveness of Spike Jonze’s Charlie Kaufman-scripted meta-masterpiece Adaptation. And yet for Almodóvar fans, it is actually a pleasant enough diversion. And if he never delivers another late-period gem like Parallel Mothers or The Skin I Live In, well, so be it.
In cinemas from 28 August
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