In Pain and Glory, time feels liquid, so thin it might not exist at all. It makes sense for a film built around water—an unrippling pool where aging director Salvador Mallo floats, blissed out for just a moment; a riverside where a young Mallo frolics while neighbourhood women launder bone-white sheets; the water he’s prone to choking on, mysteriously, and then ominously, plagued by a plethora of physical ailments; the watercolour swirls that backdrop many titles in Pedro Almodóvar’s film on painting oneself into existence.
In Pain and Glory, time feels liquid, so thin it might not exist at all.
Mallo (Antonio Banderas, in a career best) is Almodóvar, sometimes, sort of. Through sly admissions in press interviews, it’s now well-known that Banderas donned the director’s sneakers and t-shirts for the role; that his apartment in the film is a recreation of Almodóvar’s Madrid abode, down to every painstaking detail. The narrative that ostensibly propels Pain and Glory—a reunion between Mallo and Alberto Crespo, the lead in his breakout film, after a three-decade rift—also takes its roots from Banderas and Almodóvar’s own storied falling out.
But these are just myth-making theatrics surrounding a film in which contents aren’t so concerned with faithful self-portraiture as they are with self-creation. There’s a sense that no-one ever quite understands—or should understand—the impulses that drive their being, but Mallo tries anyway. His answer to that knotty existential quandary is to excavate his past. It takes little more than a passing scent or the briefest surfacing of a long-forgotten object to send Mallo—now lubricated by a new heroin habit—spiralling into memories of his childhood spent in a permanently sun-drenched village in rural Spain.
There’s a sense that no-one ever quite understands—or should understand—the impulses that drive their being, but Mallo tries anyway. His answer to that knotty existential quandary is to excavate his past.
There, we see his burgeoning queerness via an instinctual desire for a local bricklayer, his mother’s (Penelope Cruz) tender, if overbearing, affection, his penchant towards artistic endeavours beyond the ascetic confines of his religious schooling. These brushstrokes constitute something of an outline of the man Mallo becomes, though they can’t alleviate his late-in-life malaise—a blurry mix of pain, both creative and corporeal. The past can only do so much.
To create the self, then, takes something more immediate: for Mallo to assess the messiness of existence and reconcile his luminous career with his present ennui. When he does so, by acquiescing and letting Crespo stage a theatre-length monologue crafted around an autobiographical document about a lost lover, the shift seems divine. That lover—Federico, now grey-haired as Mallo himself—emerges as if willed by higher powers, and a chance reunion between the two men distils years of quiet repression into a chemistry that runs deeper than romance, or the carnal curiosity of youth.
The slippage between memory and reality stills. Timelines converge like ripples of water coalescing at an edge.
Stripped of his usual fanfare in favour of a surprising subtlety, Almodóvar can’t help but slip in a sly symmetry here. As Mallo laments the disappearance of his childhood crush, he has rediscovered another one. The slippage between memory and reality stills. Timelines converge like ripples of water coalescing at an edge. In a film steeped in history, Mallo—and Almodóvar—look to the future.
In Pain and Glory, time feels liquid, so thin it might not exist at all. It makes sense for a film built around water—an unrippling pool where aging director Salvador Mallo floats, blissed out for just a moment; a riverside where a young Mallo frolics while neighbourhood women launder bone-white sheets; the water he’s prone to choking on, mysteriously, and then ominously, plagued by a plethora of physical ailments; the watercolour swirls that backdrop many titles in Pedro Almodóvar’s film on painting oneself into existence.
In Pain and Glory, time feels liquid, so thin it might not exist at all.
Mallo (Antonio Banderas, in a career best) is Almodóvar, sometimes, sort of. Through sly admissions in press interviews, it’s now well-known that Banderas donned the director’s sneakers and t-shirts for the role; that his apartment in the film is a recreation of Almodóvar’s Madrid abode, down to every painstaking detail. The narrative that ostensibly propels Pain and Glory—a reunion between Mallo and Alberto Crespo, the lead in his breakout film, after a three-decade rift—also takes its roots from Banderas and Almodóvar’s own storied falling out.
But these are just myth-making theatrics surrounding a film in which contents aren’t so concerned with faithful self-portraiture as they are with self-creation. There’s a sense that no-one ever quite understands—or should understand—the impulses that drive their being, but Mallo tries anyway. His answer to that knotty existential quandary is to excavate his past. It takes little more than a passing scent or the briefest surfacing of a long-forgotten object to send Mallo—now lubricated by a new heroin habit—spiralling into memories of his childhood spent in a permanently sun-drenched village in rural Spain.
There’s a sense that no-one ever quite understands—or should understand—the impulses that drive their being, but Mallo tries anyway. His answer to that knotty existential quandary is to excavate his past.
There, we see his burgeoning queerness via an instinctual desire for a local bricklayer, his mother’s (Penelope Cruz) tender, if overbearing, affection, his penchant towards artistic endeavours beyond the ascetic confines of his religious schooling. These brushstrokes constitute something of an outline of the man Mallo becomes, though they can’t alleviate his late-in-life malaise—a blurry mix of pain, both creative and corporeal. The past can only do so much.
To create the self, then, takes something more immediate: for Mallo to assess the messiness of existence and reconcile his luminous career with his present ennui. When he does so, by acquiescing and letting Crespo stage a theatre-length monologue crafted around an autobiographical document about a lost lover, the shift seems divine. That lover—Federico, now grey-haired as Mallo himself—emerges as if willed by higher powers, and a chance reunion between the two men distils years of quiet repression into a chemistry that runs deeper than romance, or the carnal curiosity of youth.
The slippage between memory and reality stills. Timelines converge like ripples of water coalescing at an edge.
Stripped of his usual fanfare in favour of a surprising subtlety, Almodóvar can’t help but slip in a sly symmetry here. As Mallo laments the disappearance of his childhood crush, he has rediscovered another one. The slippage between memory and reality stills. Timelines converge like ripples of water coalescing at an edge. In a film steeped in history, Mallo—and Almodóvar—look to the future.