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.

Review: The Skin I Live In: Almodovar lives well

There is something very strange going on at the Ledgard place. Roberto, a plastic surgeon is nurturing the care and recovery of a woman in a skin suit who possibly has crippling burns to most of her body. She lives from day to day being served food and reading material via a dumb waiter while she makes bizarre sculptures out of clay and torn clothes. The servants obey her but she is a prisoner.

Roberto comes home from a lecture in which he strongly hints that he has crossed the line in an experimental procedure involving synthesised skin. He turns on the giant screen in his den and luxuriates over the sight of his patient, an unwrinkled beauty turned away with all the glory of her posterior view on show. Noticing something, he rushes to her room and finds that she has slashed her wrists. Having an impeccably well equipped operating theatre at home he is able to stitch her up and lecture her, advising that the jugular is a better choice for those serious about their suicide.

Who is she? If not his dead wife is she someone he has saved from a similar fate (she burned to death in a car accident) and fashioned in the image of his beloved? Why? And why does all this just seem to coast?

Whoopsie! Six years earlier ...

No, this film is still in cinemas and it is so fragile against spoilers that I'm stopping here. I can say that the plot involves the most troubling act of revenge I have ever seen depicted on screen. Also, that if you go to this film expecting one of Almodovar's slightly off kilter melodramas keep thinking that and enjoy the ride. He has never gone so far into the realm of fable as he does here but this is no fairy tale. Also, if you feel that you've given it forty-five minutes of your time and it really isn't moving anywhere, sit tight, it moves.

If possible scenes of surgical violence turn you off be advised that you'll find NONE here. Aldmodovar has exercised great grace in removing any distracting gore from a tale that might be red with it in lesser hands. No, he is not concerned with violence. There's plenty of anger here, anger at the human race sinking into its own hell, anger at the anger and counter anger at that. And there is grief, grief that strains toward a naive kind of perfection which rewards its witnesses with a show of futility. (I'm reaaaaaally trying to avoid spoilers here.)

So what can I say about it? I can say that loss, a long standing theme for Almodovar, is here given the gravest treatment he's yet mustered. But, typically, it is given a setting both recognisable and fantastic. This helps any who approach to concentrate on the carefully constructed emotional maelstrom on screen.

Banderas, who came to the world through Almodovar's powerful but unglamorous roles, continues here with a performance that respects its author's care. He is pitiable and menacing by turns and, somehow, always caring. Beside him is the always wonderful Elena Anaya (see here for notes on the superb Hierro -- scroll down). There's one objection I have to her performance but it necessitates a spoiler but there is one scene, as old as folk tales, where she cannot reveal who she is to loved ones without a cataclysm: her decision grinds behind her  eyes as her love and her pain fight to the death.

I'm on and off with this director. Sometimes his comedies wear (I think I'm the only person who has seen it who finds Women on the Verge a drag). And sometimes his melodramas bore. Mostly I find his great Rabelasian humanity a joy. But now and then, he'll leap from the shadows with something tough and beautiful at once, a new thing. That's what he's got here.

Bugger the new Mission Impossible in IMAX. Go for a thrill for your inner core. Go see this one.