Bitter Christmas

Spanish cinema legend Pedro Almodóvar continues his autumnal run of decorously underpowered work with Bitter Christmas, a soul-searching rumination on friendship, the artistic process and the ethical complexities of film-making itself. A rare non-world premiere to grab a main competition slot in Cannes, this low-voltage melodrama already had its domestic release in March, earning mixed reviews.

Of course, being an Almodóvar film, Bitter Christmas is still beautifully manicured and exquisitely styled, boasting more visual finesse and wry wit than most Palme d’Or contenders. But it feels a little like the 76-year-old auteur is repeating himself here with a minor-key piece of auto-fiction which too often slips into autopilot. Curzon have signed UK and Irish rights, while the director’s regular US partners Sony Picture Classics are covering North America.

Following a run of English-language projects, notably his elegantly sombre assisted-death drama The Room Next Door (2024), Almodóvar’s first film in his native language in five years returns him to some familiar late-career themes. Indeed, Bitter Christmas almost plays like a semi-remake of his prize-winning critical and commercial hit, Pain and Glory (2019). Both are semi-autobiographical portraits of veteran film-makers reflecting on love, loss and the tricky relationship between art and life.

Bitter Christmas is also being billed as the Spanish heavyweight’s most self-critical film to date. Which may be accurate but, like much of his later work, it also delivers little of the lusty mischief, dark humour and anarchic queerness of his early work. Successful artists inevitably mature into elder statement, of course, but mellow restraint has never been a good look for Almodóvar. The price of having such a strong authorial voice, to the extent of essentially creating your own genre, is that you will always be judged against your fabulous early work.

Expanded from a short story penned by the director many years ago, Bitter Christmas takes place in the familiar Almodóvar Cinematic Universe of anguished artistic types living in impeccably furnished apartments in moneyed bohemian corners of Madrid. The story intertwines two parallel plot lines, taking place 20 years apart, with characters and events that self-consciously mirror each other.

In the more contemporary scenes, older gay film director Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), very clearly an Almodóvar surrogate, is struggling with low inspiration. He begins writing a screenplay about another film-maker, Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), an exercise in auto-fiction which switches genders but otherwise remains strongly autobiographical. These earlier sections take place in 2004, a year which Almodóvar says has pivotal significance for him, possibly due to his meta-fictional box-office hit Bad Education (2004), which also featured a struggling director protagonist and numerous flashback threads.

In one of the film’s funniest scenes, Elsa explains to a baffled hospital nurse that she is a “cult” film-maker, which means “most people don’t like my films.” Even so, she enjoys a luxurious lifestyle from making TV commercials and lives with a sexy younger boyfriend, hunky charmer Bonafacio (Patrick Criado), a fireman and occasional stripper.

But much like Raúl, who co-habits with his younger partner Santi (Quim Gutiérrez), these couples do not seem well-matched intellectually or emotionally. In both the “real” and fictional plots, Elsa and Raúl are surrounded by close friends grieving from family tragedy, shock bereavement and relationship break-ups, private traumas which these unscrupulous film-makers shamelessly cannibalise for their screenplays.

Bitter Christmas gently prods at these ideas in its episodic midsection, never quite persuading us that the navel-gazing anxieties of a few well-heeled neurotic artists adds up to more than a hill of beans in the real world. But a satisfying dramatic crescendo finally arrives in the closing act, when Raúl’s recently retired and brutally honest former assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) angrily berates him for being an emotional vampire, selfishly feeding off the tragic lives of friends, lovers and family members without their consent.

A long time coming, this climax is the film’s sharpest section, an auto-fictional commentary on the ethics of auto-fiction itself, with Almodóvar aiming some choice critical barbs at himself. With the gloves off, Monica tells Raúl he has become a complacent established artist, living off his prestige, coasting on mediocre work. His new feature, she argues, will be “a minor film but your followers will accept it.” Almodóvar is surely aware this critique could equally apply to Bitter Christmas. But diagnosing the problem is not the same as fixing it, of course.

Enjoyed purely as deluxe melodrama, Bitter Christmas has plenty of appealing elements, including uniformly strong performances, especially from Lennie and Sánchez-Gijon. Cinematographer Pau Esteve Birba, production designer Antxón Gómez and art director Isabel Peinado also do great work. The visual palette, as ever, is a gorgeous canvas of vivid citrus hues and Pop Art modernism, while a short subplot filmed on Lanzarote makes great use of the island’s striking extra-terrestrial beauty. Several achingly beautiful songs by legendary Mexican singer Chavela Vargas feature prominently while a lush orchestral jazz score, by Almodóvar regular Alberto Iglesias, adds a further layer of sensory opulence. This is an impeccably tailored film, even if the fabric feels a little thin.

Director, screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar
Bárbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Victoria Luengo, Patrick Criado, Milena Smit, Quim Gutiérrez
Cinematography: Pau Esteve Birba
Editing: Teresa Font
Music: Alberto Iglesias
Production designer: Antxón Gómez
Art Director: Isabel Peinado
Costume designer: Paco Delgado
Producer: Agustín Almodóvar
Production company: El Deseo (Spain)
World sales: Film Factory Entertainment
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Spanish
112 minutes