"If You Don't Write Or Film, What Will You Do..?"
Written and directed by critically acclaimed Spanish filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar, a director responsible for the likes of Julietta and The Skin I Live In most recently, films which although may have made waves in Festival and critics circles, failed to ignite any sense of worldwide recognition, particularly to a lay audience who still seem baffled and alarmed at the thought of sitting through a film with subtitles, Pain and Glory comes to cinemas this week with a particularly enthusiastic expanded release across the U.K after making its' debut at this year's Cannes festival where the movie was selected for the Palme d'Or, albeit eventually losing out to Bong Joon-ho's comedic thriller, Parasite. Reuniting once again with long-term collaborators, Antonio Banderas (The Mask of Zorro and Penélope Cruz (Murder on the Orient Express), Almodóvar's latest is a bittersweet, expertly acted tale of regret and redemption with a staggeringly good central performance from Banderas, and whilst there is indeed much to admire about Almodóvar latest, and arguably most personal, work to date, Pain and Glory does undoubtedly suffer heavily from an annoyingly jumbled narrative and a baffling, almost cheap looking aesthetic which makes the film on a visual level seem amateurishly televisual.
With a narrative structure which comes fairly close to exhibiting the storyline traits of a portmanteau movie, Pain and Glory focuses primarily on Banderas' Salvador Mallo, a retired, hermit-esque filmmaker who upon discovering that one of his early critically acclaimed movies has become the subject of a hotly anticipated restoration, begins to contemplate the years which have preceded him, leading up to the present day where numerous medical issues are preventing him from making the most of his talent and gifts. With Mallo's story jumping from time period to time period, the flashbacks focusing on his childhood allow the movie to introduce Penélope Cruz as his overbearing and incredibly Spanish mother figure, one who sees the brightness at the heart of her son's abilities but is reluctant to allow him to discover his own path as a young Mallo soon becomes obsessed with the escapist pastime of art, cinema and before he is ready for it, the notion of true love. Whilst the editing of this narrative journey fails to be as elegant and streamlined as I would have wanted, the power of the primary performers at the heart of the tale does push aside such issues for a time, but with clear pacing issues and not enough comedic quips to fully engage my brain for the entire runtime, Pain and Glory is a moderately successful vehicle for a absolutely stupendous central performance form Banderas and a movie with such a brilliant final shot that I almost felt the need to stand up and clap.
