Film Review: Dolor y Gloria

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Juliette Boury compares director Pedro Almodóvar’s most recent film Pain and Glory to his other works, seeking to understand how Almodóvar is growing both personally and artistically.

Almodóvar’s Dolor y Gloria (2019) does not call for sentimentality, and may leave the audience feeling that something was amiss. For me, the film’s power is founded in, rather than diminished by, its ability to provoke thought without heightened emotions. It feels as if Almodóvar’s previous works have been building up to Dolor y Gloria, not because it’s measurably better than them, (it’s not), but because of a difference in its tone. While Dolor y Gloria marks an obvious departure from one of Almodóvar’s first features, the chaotic and kitsch Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980), it also distances itself from Volver (2006). Despite both works featuring many elements of the director’s own personal history (in Volver much is shot in La Mancha, Almodóvar’s birthplace) Dolor y Gloria is more personal, as Almodóvar admitted at a preview. Although, he jokes, tongue-in-cheek, that not all we see should be taken ‘literally’. 

A common thread in Almodóvar’s work is the autobiographical feature of filmmaker as protagonist, such as in Mala Educación and Los Abrazos Rotos. Like Martin Blanco (Lluís Homar) in Los Abrazos Rotos, the character Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) is a struggling filmmaker who no longer writes or produces. Instead, he spends his time suffering from a myriad of physical and mental ailments. Banderas excels in this role: he is both irresistible and pitiable, a young boy enmeshed in the mind and body of an ageing man. His large brown eyes twinkle in defiance of his character’s bleak reality, bringing a light-heartedness into the film that is supplemented by the recurring scenes of Salvador’s childhood.

Jacinta (Penelope Cruz), Salvador’s mother, exudes sensitivity and thriftiness. She is a strong female presence, only replaced in his adult life by an old friend Zulema, (Cecilia Roth), whose domination on camera is quieter than Cruz. Almodóvar remains a better director of women than of men, working best with his muses – Cruz, Roth, Carmen Maura, Marisa Parades, and Rossy de Palma, to name but a few. Yet, watching this film, I craved more scenes in which women would discuss, plot, simply be, or take on roles. These elements have been so powerful in previous works such as Todo Sobre mi Madre or Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, that the film felt somewhat diminished by its minimal female presence. 

Colour is to Almodóvar’s mise-en-scene what salt is to Samin Nosrat’s cooking. The iconic matching of Banderas’s green leather jacket to Roth’s bright red coat could be part of the exhibition into which they walk. It’s as if the absence of food on Banderas’ kitchen counter is replaced by the tomato red colour of its surface. The fact that Zulema and Salvador talk of death and pain against such vibrant colours sums up Almodóvar in a nutshell: inciting desire, passion, pain, and glory in unexpected, disconcerting, or comforting forms.

Almodóvar has at times been controversial in his challenging of normative moral boundaries. In one of his self-professed favourite films, Hable con Ella, the audience manages to feel empathy for a man who has raped a comatose woman. Dolor y Gloria is much less provocative. In its exploration of excess, heroin dominates neither the film’s narrative nor its characters. After having first tried heroin, Salvador struggles but eventually seeks treatment. Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia) – his past lover — is now clean. Alberto (Asier Etxeandia) – Salvador’s reunited colleague — refuses to do lines of the drug when reciting those for his role from Salvador’s 1980 memoirs. The ‘Movida Madrileña’ in the 1980s was Madrid’s equivalent of San Francisco’s summer of love in 1967. After the death of Franco, the ‘movida’ was one of self-liberation, drug exploration, artistic explosion, and sexual freedom. Anything went. Almodóvar’s earlier films, such as Laberintos de Pasiones or Lucia, Pepi y Bom were filmed and set in the Movida decade. Fittingly, this film reflects this era of liberation but is anchored in the present, as expressed in Alberto’s monologue about Salvador, which is self-aware of how people and places have changed with time. The film is a looking-glass into the director’s own process of moving on from the ‘80s with them. A certain nostalgia persists. 

Still, a few highs and lows permeate the film: literally, when Salvador tries heroin, and figuratively, when he meets Federico again after many decades. Their physical intimacy does not lead to sex but remains hugely cathartic. The pain in their encounter is matched by a warmth which allows for closure as Federico leaves Salvador’s apartment. At this point, the camera moves in on Salvador walking towards his stash of heroin. Rather than overdose, Salvador flushes the drug down the loo. With maturity comes an ability to feel. Like Salvador towards the end of the film, Almodóvar has experienced enough pain to be able to revel in the glory of feeling it. 

Indeed, he chooses to describe Salvador’s illnesses through a trippy montage of digitally created images, rather than portray them through the perspective of the character, detaching Salvador from pain and glory to suggest their impermanence. His physical and mental conditions are juxtaposed with the monotonous, bland tone with which they are described, stripping them of the usual emotionality associated with illness. In parallel, mealtimes are a trope of Almodóvar’s films; however, none are found in this one – less is being consumed, as more has been digested. Overall, Almodóvar seems to have processed elements of his life that he would have dealt with through filmmaking in the past.

Towards the end of the film Banderas is put into an MRI scan. Then, in a “flashback” which the audience has already seen, the camera moves to a young Salvador and Jacinta getting ready to sleep in a train station. However, in a plot twist, the camera pans out, revealing a film crew. Were all “flashbacks” actually scenes from a future film that Banderas would make after his MRI scan, or ruminations about a potential film during the scan? Almodóvar had provided a clue that the supposed flashbacks were not so when the audience met Jacinta as an old lady (Julieta Serrano), because her bright blue eyes were not Cruz’ deep brown ones. The revealing of the film crew suggests that what the audience saw of Salvador’s childhood is nothing more than his interpretation of it as an adult. Just as what we see of Almodóvar’s films, in spite of its autobiographical elements, is a retelling from the director’s perspective — a disjointed conflation of memory and imagination.

Then perhaps we do end on a note of glory. The filmmaker, Salvador, who was depressed and incapable of making a new film, may actually be in the process of making one that, as we know from the seeming ‘flashbacks,’ will be very good. If Almodóvar continues to excel in being meta, I have no doubt that his next project will also be a fantastic film.