Part of a string of late-career Pedro Almodóvar films that aren’t as dazzling as his early work but feel deep and profound, “Bitter Christmas” is a Russian nesting doll of a movie. It’s a layered meditation on the intersection of life and cinema that feels impersonal until all of a sudden it becomes deeply personal.
For its first few minutes, the movie seems to be about a cult writer-director who’s starting to write her long-delayed third movie. Then it turns into a movie about a different filmmaker who’s writing that movie about the cult director writing her third movie. And by the time it ends, it’s a movie about Pedro Almodóvar writing a movie about a man who’s writing a movie about a woman who’s getting an idea for a movie.
Got that?
If it sounds labyrinthine, it is. And at all levels of this tangled concoction, the directors (the fictional ones and the real one) are dealing with ethical questions about whether it’s OK to borrow from other people’s real lives for the sake of their fiction. The movie goes down an autofiction rabbit hole that can be challenging and for some wearying, but his fascination with blurring the lines between fact and fiction can be thrilling when he turns it on himself.
The film begins in 2004, with Elsa (Barbara Lennie), a director with two cult films to her credit in a career that has segued into commercials, sent to the hospital with brutal migraines (and maybe even a panic attack as well). Then it abruptly jumps to 2026, when we meet Raul (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a writer-director who is actually writing the s tory about Elsa that we’ve just been watching. (He set it in 2004, he says, because that’s when he had his first panic attack.)
The Raul sequences show him struggling to figure out the movie about Elsa, while the Elsa sequences show that movie emerge as he’s writing it. Some of the elements in the Elsa movie are clearly based on incidents or people in Raul’s life, though the heavy hand of fiction is often present: Elsa’s boyfriend, Bonafacio, is an obvious movie character, a hunky firefighter who works as a stripper on the weekends.
As it plays out, the movie gradually grows more, shall we say, Almodóvarian: The first time we glimpse Elsa’s apartment as she’s in the throes of her migraine, it’s largely seen in muted colors and grays; when we return to it, it’s full of vibrant reds and yellows. And when Elsa and her friend Patricia take a trip to the island of Lanzarote, there’s a wildly dramatic and entirely characteristic shot looking down on the two women from above, where they lie on white towels against the black volcanic sand wearing red and black outfits.
On that trip, Patricia reads the script Elsa is writing and is furious that part of it is inspired by marital problems that Patricia and her husband are having. When the action shifts back to the present day, Raul gets even more flak for his own borrowings: Inspired by Elena, a friend of a friend who attempted suicide after the death of her son, he writes a character, Natalie, who loses a son and then tries to kill herself.
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Raul’s valuable aide Monica (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) is furious with Raul for using a friend’s suicide attempt as a plot point; in a line that got a good laugh in Cannes, she suggests he drop that section of the movie entirely, write it off as a minor work and sell it to Netflix. “I ask for your advice,” he shouts, “and you tell me to make a TV movie!”
In a way, a pair of raging conversations between Raul and Monica are the third act of the film, and the moment when it becomes clear that while Elsa might be Raul’s alter ego, Raul is Pedro’s alter ego. The arguments take all of the movie’s explorations of autofiction and pose them in a scorching way that is unmistakably aimed at Almodóvar himself, who has mined his own life in films like “Volver” and “Pain and Glory,” while Monica also savages Raul for being “more honest in your films than you are in your life,” notably in his lack of honesty about Santiago, the young man who lives with him.
In the raging conversation between Monica and Raul that takes up the final stretch of the film, there are enough details dropped and enough accusations flung that it seems clearly to be Almodóvar interrogating his own filmmaking in the guise of one character blasting another. In a film of layers, the ultimate one is perhaps to get down so deep that you’re watching the film criticize itself.
Not as showy or as star-studded as recent films Almodóvar has made with Antonio Banderas (“Pain and Glory”) and Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore (“The Room Next Door,” “Bitter Christmas” is instead a difficult but virtuoso piece of auto-fiction, self-criticism and maybe even vindication. As usual, the craftsmanship is impeccable from cinematographer Paul Esteve Birba, production designer Antxon Gomez and costume designer Paco Delgado, among others, while songs like Chavela Vargas’ ravaged version of “La Llorona” play a huge role. Alberto Iglesias’ score is placid and lyrical until the final confrontation, when it gets so urgent that it would have worked in an action movie. But maybe those scenes are Almodóvar’s version of an action movie, embracing the action of ideas and verbiage.
By the end, the lines between life and art and between 2004 and 2026 have been dissolved, as Raul sits at his writing desk staring at his characters, who stare back at him. But you have to figure that they’re all staring at Pedro Almodóvar, too. And he’s still an awfully good person to stare at.