Pain and Glory (2019)
Dolor y gloria
Film details
Drama · Pedro Almodóvar · 1h 54min
Synopsis
Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker in the twilight of his career, remembers his life: his mother, his lovers, the actors he worked with. The sixties in a small village in Valencia, the eighties in Madrid, the present, when he feels an immeasurable emptiness, facing his mortality, the incapability of continuing filming, the impossibility of separating creation from his own life. The need of narrating his past can be his salvation.
Verdict
Autobiographical art-house film that normalizes the protagonist's homosexuality.
In-depth analysis
From the very first minutes, Pain and Glory establishes the protagonist's homosexuality as a central autobiographical axis. The film reconstructs the life of a film director (a stand-in for Almodóvar himself) through fragmented memories: his childhood, his first adult love —a homosexual relationship in 1980s Madrid— and his present marked by physical pain and the inability to create. The work neither debates nor problematizes this dimension: it presents it as a settled fact of an artistic life.
The formal quality is undeniable —Antonio Banderas delivers a performance of remarkable restraint, the cinematography is meticulous, the rhythm contemplative—, yet the technical excellence does not negate the underlying concern. There is also a sequence of heroin use which, while not glorified, is not condemned either: it functions as a melancholic record of escape from suffering. The film is intimate auteur cinema, not militant propaganda, but it naturally introduces a vision of sexuality and identity contrary to the natural order. Not recommended for families or for viewers without a well-formed discernment, regardless of the critical acclaim it has received.