Clearly, I love challenging myself to a good film series.
In the fall, it was 10 Weeks of Spooktober. Then I did 12 Days of Christmas Movies throughout the month of December. Now, I’m back just in time for the tail end of awards season with a new series called February Foreign Films. And with the way February is going, it’s going to be Five February Foreign Films. That’s a lot of F’s.
This is exactly what it sounds like. I will be watching and reviewing buzzy foreign films in the month of February. They must, however, be completely new to me. So, sorry, no Parasite, which I already named my #1 thing of 2019. And no Atlantics, although that is a really good movie, and it’s available on Netflix… so you should watch it right away.
So with all of that out of the way, let’s get into our very first February Foreign Film: Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, starring Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, who is nominated for an Oscar for this role.
Pain and Glory (or Dolar y Gloria) is the story of an older filmmaker named Salvador Mallo (Banderas) who is reuniting with old friends (and rivals) and looking back at his life. While many of the details of Mallo’s life are similar to those of Almodóvar himself, the filmmaker insists the movie is not strictly autobiographical. Some things Almodóvar has in common with Mallo: they are both successful filmmakers (obvies) both gay, both suffered from back pain and eventually underwent surgery, and both went to a religious boarding school that was educating them to become priests.
Disclaimer: that is not an exhaustive list of the commonalities. Those are just the connections of which I am aware. There was only so much research I was willing to do for this review, and I am fully admitting to that.
In an interview with Slate, Almodóvar said of the film, “It has a lot to do with me. Intimately speaking, it’s the movie closest to me. But you can’t take it literally as an autobiography. Let’s just say that all the places and all the situations that happen are familiar to me, but I haven’t explicitly gone through them myself.”
Almodóvar seems very adamant about this separation between art and artist in many of his interviews. Perhaps this is to separate himself from Mallo’s more destructive tendencies? The filmmaker in the movie does, after all, turn to a heroin habit to deal with his crippling pain. And in a New York Times article, Almodóvar admitted that some aspects of the film “frightened” his friends.
I’m focusing so much on Almodóvar’s intentions and connections in this film because the film itself seems to be a meta-reflection on the difficulty of creating autobiographical (or semi-autobiographical) art. How do you reach the truth of something through film (or any art) when memory, sentiment, and time colors everything? Can you truly return to something through art after its gone?
Without giving too much away about the trajectory of the film in general, there are a few points in the movie where we are directed towards the artificiality of something that we took to be real. A scene that we thought was part of the movie turns out to be a scene Mallo is filming, for instance. A monlogue to the film audience turns out to be a monologue onstage to an audience within the film. And so on.
All of this blurs the line between autobiography and fiction in interesting ways, and so it makes sense that Almodóvar is wary of calling this film anything more than semi-autobiographical, in spite of all of the connections that can be made.
It should also be noted that the movie is more episodic that it is a traditional story arc with rising action, which also reflects life. It does, however, make this a difficult movie to discuss plot-wise without just going through each plot point. So I won’t bother.
I chose to start this series with this movie because with the Academy Awards coming up next weekend, this is one I wanted to catch first, as it is nominated in a few categories. I’ve also been a fan of Almodóvar’s previous work. While this is not my favorite of his films, this is definitely one that is worth watching. There are moments of humor in this, and genuine moments of pain and sadness. And as usual, Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas are bonafide movie stars whose charisma definitely adds a little something louder to what might otherwise be described as a very quiet movie.
Pain and Glory is currently available to rent in basically all of the normal places you usually rent stuff. Check it out before the Oscars, and come back next weekend for more February Foreign Films.