Legendary Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film — Dolor y Gloria — opens with the camera slowly encroaching upon a man floating at the bottom of a pool, motionless, seemingly relishing in the release of all physical tension for the few moments that his breathlessness will allow. The film then cuts to a group of women and a young boy on the side of a river, the women washing clothes by hand and singing harmoniously as the wind blows through the reeds and the sun shines warmly. Thus begins Almodóvar’s most personal story of his career, a very rich and moving narrative that interweaves history, memory, creativity, and desire into a deep reflection upon the man’s seven decades of life and four decades in film.
Immediately following the first two scenes of the film, we very quickly realize that the man in the pool is Salvador Mallo (played exquisitely by Antonio Banderas), an aging but universally lauded Spanish director who is essentially a stand-in for Almodovar himself. This comes with the revelation of the scene by the river being a now distant memory of Mallo’s childhood, with his mother (Penélope Cruz) and the other women being the ones washing and singing by the river. The rest of the film is made up of Mallo’s daily doings interspliced with occasional memories of his childhood in a rural village outside of Madrid, calling back to the origins of his creativity and first desires along the way. His journey of self-reflection involves reconciling the oppressive nature of his numerous physical and mental ailments, a re-acclimation with an old collaborator (Asier Etxeandia) whom he hadn’t spoken to in over 30 years, descending into a heroin addiction out of the blue, and ruminating upon his trials and tribulations as a young man and his failures in the eyes of his dying mother.
According to Almodóvar himself, the idea for the film began to germinate after the director went through a painful operation on his back, one that Mallo himself goes through in the film as well. As a result, as the title quite literally suggests, Mallo feels as if his every being has been consumed by his various aches and pains, at one point narrating a host of lively medical animations detailing everything he suffers from. In the film, Mallo’s ill-conceived solution is to escape the present through a multitude of vices, including avoiding the outside world and trying some unusually hard drugs to ease the pain. Fortunately, however, the film is not meant to be a drug addiction story, and instead uses the character’s indulgence as a means to further develop the more personal and reconciliatory themes it intends to portray, even having a mildly dark wit about it at the aging man’s expense. Much of this strange but rather true-to-life mixture of tone is carried on the shoulders of Banderas in a truly world class performance, who is able to evoke the whole spectrum of emotions while simultaneously retaining an air of quiet sorrow throughout that allows the narrative to flow as it must.
Just as the film’s central journey is about confronting oneself and making peace with one’s past, it very much feels as if Almodóvar himself is going on this same journey as the film goes on. As a whole, it is a form of gentle self-reckoning, a portal into the man’s sorrows and his struggle to forgive himself in order to come to terms with his existence in the present, all in the service of continuing his art. In this way, Almodóvar’s self-reflection is deeply evocative and powerful, penetrating deep into the mind and soul and asking us what is the real reason we are escaping the present. It beckons us to find what is that actually plagues us; what events from our past have we truly not gotten over, be it consciously or subconsciously? It asks us to allow ourselves to come to appreciate that which was good in our lives that is long since past, to view our triumphs and moments of warmth with great joy rather than in forlorn dejection. Through this film, as in the shot of Banderas in the pool, Almodóvar seeks to release himself of all tension, to break from his bonds (be them self-inflicted or outwardly imposed) which tie him down to stagnation and avoidance of the present. Because of this weight that the film inherently holds, each word carries with it a bit more than it usually would, and each slight pause or hesitation moves mountains.
In many ways, Pain and Glory is about the restoration of life, taking it head on even in the face of its seemingly endless physical, mental, and emotional pain. Yet, make no mistake, it is no powerful triumph, there is no crescendo. It builds quietly and reflectively to moments of understanding and self-actualization; in the end it evokes a sense of bittersweet and humble beauty that oozes off the screen and nestles deep in your heart.
4/5 STARS