It is not an autobiography, specifies Almodóvar, rather an autofiction. Coquetry of an artist worried about having opened up too much. Who Antonio Banderas if not, does he incarnate the filmmaker’s alter ego? Salvador, his character, is a director. He lives in an apartment identical to that of Almodóvar, wears the same clothes. In rehabilitation after surgery, Salvador is depressed. He pours out on the migraines, sciatica, tendonitis that punctuate his daily life. He remembers his miserable childhood in the Valence countryside as a Renoir haven of happiness in the center of which shone his first star, his mother (Penélope Cruz). He reconnects with Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), a returning junkie actor, whom he hadn’t spoken to for thirty-two years and who introduced him to heroin.
Epiphanic vision
Together, they must present to the Madrid Cinematheque a restored version of the film at the origin of their anger. The depression of the artist at the time of the balance sheet, the cinema more beautiful than life, which is only pain: these clichés, Almodóvar dynamites them with the wisdom of the old master who has nothing more to hide. Has a filmmaker ever told himself so directly? Not even Fellini with “Huit et demi”, whose poster we can see. Sorting out the true from the false is as unimportant as distinguishing what, in this overlapping story, is memory or fantasy. Art, dreams and reality fit together to form an inseparable whole, without which existence would be insurmountable.
Almodóvar knows that the smell of urine and jasmine from the movies of his youth is as precious and universal as the grief of not having been the man his mother would have been proud of. He may not have found an old love again through one of his creations. He probably didn’t have sunstroke when he was 9 when he discovered the naked body of the mason to whom he was giving Spanish lessons, an epiphanic vision that awakened him to homosexuality. But these scenes are among the director’s most beautiful shots. Almodóvar will not write his Memoirs, he has just filmed them. “Pain and Glory” forms the off-screen of all his work. Literally: a masterpiece.
Tuesday May 2 at 10:50 p.m. on Ciné+ Emotion. Spanish drama by Pedro Almodóvar (2019). With Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz, Asier Etxeandia. 1h52. (Multicast and On Demand).
