Ua long career 46 years, 23 films, including several masterpieces (Talk to her, All about my mother). Pedro Almodóvar with Amarga Navidad (Bitter Christmas), in competition at Cannes, despite having been in Spanish theaters since March, it is proof that you can also age very well behind the camera. That decline is not a given, that life and reality offer continuous springboards for stratospheric launches as long as you know how to tell stories.
Amarga Navidad: the plot of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film
And it is precisely around this that the La Mancha director’s latest film revolves. We are in 2004, a date chosen not by chance because, we learn, in that year Raúl the director (Leonardo Sbaraglia, we always see him at the computer keyboard intent on writing a screenplay) had his first panic attack.
The same problem that afflicts the protagonist of the film she is writing, Monica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). Who ends up in the emergency room in the same room where he shot his film which, the doctor who treats her reveals to us, has become “cult”, that is, it does not mean affiliated with a religion (“evangelicals?” ventures the health worker), but which is simply “a film that the majority of people are not interested in”.
There were two rooms that had hosted his set, in one the protagonist had died. Monica asks to spend the night in the other one, the one that guarantees survival, because «cinema has something premonitory». We are not certain that the soothsayers analyze the frames, but that the game of mirrors of Amarga Navidad represents a magnificent and imperfect geometry it’s a certainty. Imperfect to the point of allowing the author to criticize his own film (within the film).
There are holes in the script and characters that get lost, and too many themes already covered (“your mother’s death again?”), decrees his former assistant angrily. But the gravest sin does not concern the structure. The trial is of a moral nature: the theft of the lives (and pain) of others is under accusation.
Aitana Sánchez-Gijón and Victoria Luengo. (Warner Bros.)
An attempt suicide, a terrible loss, everything becomes material for the story. No one is saved from the vampire fury of the creators (and the issue is a bit reminiscent of the lawsuit, finally won by the author, that the actress Marianne Denicourt brought against the French director Arnaud Desplechin, her former partnerfor using a tragic family story of his in the film Rois et reines2004).
Chavela Vargas, sublime travel companion
The bitter Christmas of the title is the one sung by Chavela Vargas, Almodóvar’s traveling companion which here presents a heartbreaking version of The llorona (used several times in his films). «In his last concerts he almost didn’t sing anymore. He had lost his voice”, explains Monica to her friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo, also the magnificent protagonist of El ser querido by Rodrigo Sorogoyen) who cries together with her listening to the incomparable Costa Rican while “murmurs” the notes that made her known to the world.
«I always go back to the old places where I loved life, and I understand how I am listening to the strange things» sings Chavela. «We always return to the old places where we loved to live, and then we understand how absent the things we loved are».
The hall of mirrors is imperfect and beautiful. Reality breaks into fiction and there is no way to stem it. Those who know how to create have no inhibitory brakes and do not allow judgements. The irresistible impulse materializes a new story. And inevitably throw away the old one. Together with its protagonists, sitting in silence on a sofa in Lanzarote waiting for dialogues and scene arrangements that will never arrive again.
