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With his hedgehog of grey hair, primary coloured knits, and love of the chic and the feng-shui’ed, the writer-director in Pedro Almodóvar’s piquant and boldly meta two-timeline tragicomedy could easily be called ‘Pedro’ instead of Raul. Played by Argentinian actor Leonardo Sbaraglia (Wild Tales), Raul is Almodóvar channelling himself through the harshest of lenses. ‘The film where I’ve been cruellest with myself’ is how he’s described it. He’s right. It’s brutal.
It’s 2026. Raul is a veteran filmmaker grinding away at his first screenplay in several years, weighing up the twin golden handshakes of an invite to a Qatari film festival and a possible Netflix deal. A diva consumed with his own creative struggle, he’s become vampiric in pursuit of inspiration, sinking his teeth into the lives of those around him. Long-time assistant Monica (Parallel Mothers’ Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), is departing his service to care for her partner who has just lost a child, and loyal younger boyfriend Santi (Quim Gutiérrez), is picking up the slack. Both are grist to the mill for a melodrama called ‘Bitter Christmas’ set 22 years earlier.
Like Almodóvar’s answer to Charlie Kaufman autofiction Adaptation, half of the film is set within that film. Here, it’s 2004 and Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) is a pill-popping commercials director searching for inspiration for a return to filmmaking. Beset with migraines, she’s looked after by hunky but vacant young boyfriend (Patrick Criado), a fireman who moonlights as a stripper – and of whom she’s tiring. She has one close friend (Victoria Luengo) dealing with an adulterous husband and another (Milena Smit) mourning the death of a child. Elsa is using them as inspiration for her new screenplay. A trip to the black sands of Lanzarote – a return to Almodóvar’s darkly symbolic Broken Embraces turf – brings all these threads together in abrasively theatrical style.
Bitter Christmas finds the Spaniard at his most raw and introspective
Elsa, of course, is Raul channelling himself – and the characters in this occasionally inspired, sometimes clunky sub-Almodóvarian work-in-progress are ciphers for Santi, Monica and co. The portraits aren’t universally flattering, and neither is their feedback.
Bitter Christmas finds the Spaniard at his most raw and introspective – looking inwards and not entirely enjoying what he finds. Even more than the flawless Pain and Glory, in which the Spaniard channelled his own nostalgia and creative anxieties through Antonio Banderas’ creaking auteur, it lays bare the soul of a filmmaker in his autumn years. It’s a lesser film and a moodier one – ill-health and medication are motifs – but the Kaufmanesque candour (okay, self-loathing) is as bracing as the structural daring. And naturally, it looks immaculate, Almodóvar’s long-time production designer Antxón Gómez weaving magic across both time periods.
Never mind separating the art from the artist, Bitter Christmas asks if it’s the artist themself that needs to respect boundaries, and at what cost. Unlike Raul, Almodovar has lost none of his ability to surprise and provoke.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Aug 28.