Tag: pain and glory

PAIN AND GLORY – Review

Center: Antonio Banderas as Salvador
© El Deseo. Photo by Manolo Pavón. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

Making a film about a movie maker is a tricky thing but thankfully, Pedro Almodovar gets it right in the Spanish-language drama PAIN AND GLORY. Get it wrong and you have a self-absorbed mess right but get it right and you have something luminous like 8 1/2. In PAIN AND GLORY, an aging Spanish film director, with a long, storied career, reflects on his past life, particularly a childhood in poverty, as he copes with the pain and physical ailments that keep him from continuing to do what he loves – make movies.

The Oscar-winning Spanish director/writer/producer Pedro Almodovar has had his own storied career, with films ranging across genres with dramas like Oscar winner ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, thrillers like THE SKIN I LIVE IN, and comedies like his breakout WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. Many Almodovar films have an element of drawing on the director’s own life but it is much more pronounced in this film about a director, of course.

Almodovar has made a number of great films, and can add one more with PAIN AND GLORY. For any great director, some films turn out better than others but PAIN AND GLORY is one of Almodovar’s successes. Almodovar frequently casts the same actors in lead roles in his films, particularly so with Javier Bardem, Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz, and favorites Banderas and Cruz return in this one.

Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) is a Spanish film director who has had a lot of cinema glory in his career but now he lives in a world of pain. Unable to continue making films due to a host of physical ailments coupled with depression, the aging director lives a nearly reclusive life, spending time remembering his past life, particularly his childhood and his beloved mother. Penelope Cruz plays his mother Jacinta, who takes her son from her their rural village to a small town hoping for a better life, a village where Salvador’s father has gone seeking work. Rather than wait for him to send for them, his wife and small son arrive unannounced, and she is dismayed to find the appalling conditions in which her husband as living. Undeterred, she struggles to make life better and give her bright son a future.

In the present, the director’s manager Mercedes (Nora Navas) tries to draw him out of his hermit-like life, and finally persuades him to appear at a retrospective featuring one his old films. A chance meeting with an actress he had not seen in years sparks him to reconnect with the star of that now-classic film. The director and actor had parted ways over the actor’s portrayal of the main character but the director has reconsidered his reaction to the film on re-watching it these many years later. Meanwhile, the actor, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), has fallen on hard times, in part due to his heroin addiction, and the high-profile retrospective offers a chance to revive his sagging career.

Like all Almodovar films, there are a lot of complicated, often edgy things going on around this plot and with these equally complicated, flawed people. As in most Almodovar films, the strong characters, the ones with will and focus, are the women. In this case, it is both the director’s mother, in his memories of her from his childhood and in her later years (where she is played by Julieta Serrano ), and his manager Mercedes who help Salvador find his way.

The script is more introspective and universal than one might expect. Although this particular character is a film director, his experiences and situation could be any person of a certain age, remembering the childhood that shaped them, remembering first loves, first heartbreaks, and re-evaluating one’s work with the perspective of time, and contemplating the later part of life, as Salvador.

But this film is not all seriousness, by any means. There are elements of humor, particularly in the scenes with the actor Alberto, played winningly by Asier Etxeandia. When Salvador waffles about inviting Alberto to speak along at the film retrospective, Alberto tries to persuade him, as if he is auditioning, and Salvador unconsciously slips into directing, telling him not to cry at the event, and commenting the “actors always want to cry,” with exasperation. The film also has moments of romance, sweetness and poignancy, as well as struggle, indecision and bad decisions, making it a warm and emotionally engaging experience.

The acting is superb, as it always is in Almodovar’s films. Antonio Banderas turns in one of his best performances, as a man in emotional and physical pain, trying to find his way in late life and reconciling the past while contemplating the future. Penelope Cruz glows as young Salvador’s mother, displaying iron determination, showering him with love while working tirelessly to build his future. Other supporting actors strengthen and deepen the narrative too. Leonardo Sbaraglia is warm as Frederico, a long-lost lover who reconnects with Salvador, and César Vicente is touching as Eduardo, an artistically-talented and handsome young man, who sparks the early stirrings of sexual attraction in young Salvador (Asier Flores).

The film is visually vibrant, filled with bright colors, sunlight, and bold graphic shapes, giving the images on screen energy. The attention to the beautiful composition and color in nearly every scene gives the feeling of being inside a painting, and in fact, paintings and artists are a motif running throughout the film. But everything is masterfully integrated in this film, the story, the imagery and performances, so that it draws into its world fully and involves us deeply in Salvador’s dilemma grappling with the aches and regrets of late life but resolving them to find a path to keep living.

PAIN AND GLORY is a impressive but of cinema but it is, more importantly, a rich film experience for thoughtful audiences, both warm, bittersweet and satisfying.

PAIN AND GLORY, in Spanish with English subtitles, opens Friday, Oct. 25, at the Plaza Frontenac and Tivoli theaters.

RATING: 4 out of 4 stars

Pedro Almodóvar’s Goes On A Personal Journey In PAIN AND GLORY Trailer Starring Antonio Banderas

Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar goes on a personal journey in this first trailer for Sony Classics PAIN AND GLORY, starring Antonio Banderas.

Salvador Mallo is a veteran film director, afflicted by multiple ailments, the worst of which is his inability to continue filming. His physical condition doesn’t allow it and, if he can’t film again, his life has no meaning. The mixture of medications, along with an occasional flirtation with heroin, means that Salvador spends most of his day prostrate. This drowsy state transports him to a time in his life that he never visited as a narrator. His childhood in the 60s, when he emigrated with his parents to Paterna, a village in Valencia, in search of prosperity. His mother is the beacon of that era, struggling and improvising so that the family can survive.

Also, the first desire appears. His first adult love in the Madrid of the 80s. The pain of the breakup of that love while it was still alive and intense. Writing as the only therapy to forget the unforgettable, the early discovery of cinema when films were projected on a whitewashed wall, in the open air. The cinema of his childhood smells of piss (the children urinated behind that wall), of jasmine and of the summer breeze. And also cinema as the only salvation in the face of pain, absence and emptiness. In recovering his past, Salvador finds the urgent need to recount it, and in that need he also finds his salvation.

Almodóvar says:

Quite unintentionally, Pain and Glory is the third part of a spontaneously created trilogy that has taken thirty two years to complete. The first two parts are Law of Desire and Bad Education. In the three films, the protagonists are male characters who are film directors, and desire and cinematic fiction are the pillars of the story, but the way in which fiction is glimpsed alongside reality differs in each one of them. Fiction and life are two sides of the same coin, and life always includes pain and desire. Pain and Glory reveals, among other themes, two love stories that have left their mark on the protagonist, two stories determined by time and fate and which are resolved in the fiction. When the first story happens, the protagonist is unaware of living it. He only remembers it fifty years later. It’s the story of the first time he felt the impulse of desire. Salvador was nine years old and the impression was so intense that he fell to the floor in a faint, as if struck by lightning. The second is a story that takes place at the height of the 80s, when the country was celebrating the explosion of freedom that came with democracy. This love story which Salvador writes so as to forget about it ends up transformed into a monologue, performed by Alberto Crespo and also credited to him because Salvador doesn’t want anyone to recognize him. He cedes his authorship to the actor, giving in to his insistent demand.

If you write about a director (and your work consists of directing films), it’s impossible not to think of yourself and not take your experiences as a reference. It was the most practical. My house is the house where Antonio Banderas’ character lives, the furniture in the kitchen — and the rest of the furnishings — are mine or have been reproduced for the occasion and the paintings that hang on its walls. We tried to make Antonio’s image, especially his hair, look like mine. The shoes and many of the clothes also belong to me, and the colors of his clothing. When there was some corner to fill on the set, the art director sent his assistant to my house to get some of the many objects with which I live. This is the most autobiographical aspect of the film and it turned out to be very comfortable for the crew. As a matter of fact, José Luis Alcaine came to the house several times to see the light at different hours of the day, so as to reproduce it later in the studio. I remember that during rehearsals I said to Antonio: If you think that in any sequence it’ll help if you imitate me, you can do it. Antonio said no, that it wasn’t necessary. And he was right, his character wasn’t me, but it was inside me.

Opens October 4 in New York and Los Angeles.