Review: PAIN & GLORY

Salvador Mallo, prominent film auteur, is ageing. The medical conditions that have followed him from childhood are ramping up and preventing him from concentrating on creative work. His mother, centre of his life's gravity, is recently deceased. And then the national Cinemateque has revived his old breakthrough hit and demands he front up for a Q&A at the screening. He pursues its star, Alberto from whom he has been estranged ever since, some three decades to join him on stage at the event. As Salvador smooths over the initial hostility from Alberto, on a whim he asks to join the actor in a spot of heroin. It's the drug habit that split the pair as creative partners back in the day but Salvador's pain is getting the better of him and he likely sees it as a bonding opportunity. He loves it. Welcome to the slippery slide.

Actually, no, welcome to Pedro Almovodar's strongest film for years. Salvador is his stand-in and Alberto is the stand-in of Almodovar's old dependable Antonio Banderas. Antonio Banderas is playing Salvador. Confused? You won't be. Almovodar wants us to delight in the meta casting but really leaves it there and just gets on with telling the story. And that's what we do get; a tale of interlocking lives backed by an autobiography that celebrate the bonds between colleagues, mother and son, friends, old flames and the past and present incarnations of one's own self. Almodovar keeps all these elements so elegantly defined that there is no space for confusion and precious little time for guessing.

Banderas' Salvador is fragile from pain, he shudders from touch and takes time to speak as though the act of it was burdensome. In picking something up from the floor he will first drop a cushion there for his knee. Just as we confidently assume his testimony of medical conditions (delivered in a 3D animated sequence) is a confession of hypochondria we do see him in physical difficulty. His taste of heroin is not just curiosity. Banderas almost makes us see the emotional diving bell Salvador carries around him in the company of others. The fragility in contrast with the ferocity of his creative thoughts let us in on the raging figure he has been.

As his mother in flashback, Penelope Cruz shows us the hardening of a woman whose life has become a swing between the weakness of a war-damaged husband and her devotion to a son she sees as the sole possibility of goodness to emerge from their lives. Julieta Serrano, as her older self shows a woman who has learned a lighter touch to a laborious life and even to an impending death. Her dialogues with the older Salvador are of grave matter but given with such levity we have to remember what they were about. Asier Etxeandia as the movie actor Alberto is like a mid-career De Niro but lost without his best director. That might make him sound overly dependent but the relationship is a complex one that requires a lot of impromptu tinkering.

This is set against a non-nostalgic past and unromantic present yet it still charms and engages. And even if it doesn't there are always the visuals which are among Almodovar's richest and most nutritious. If that's too purple you might more plainly enjoy the poignancy of a great cinematic artist celebrating what he loves about his life and however fancy of image or lofty of thought that might be it must always come back to the work. The work is where this film ends and what it has always been about and where its heart and beauty live.