Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar, 2019) (Patreon)

Pedro Almodóvar is like an emotionally unavailable boyfriend. It seems that on the rare occasions that he lets down the guard of his fantastical, melodramatic style and instead gestures toward some kind of self-disclosure, critics swoon as if the director is actually opening up and giving us a peek at his soul. This was particularly the case with All About My Mother, and ever since then, there has been a fairly direct correlation between the degree of autobiography in Pedro's films and the critical approbation they've received. Conversely, when Almodóvar embraces overt artifice, he is perceived as trying, and failing, to recapture his glory days.

Pain and Glory is a fairly straightforward "late film" in that it features Antonio Banderas, an actor who began his career with Pedro, starring as Salvador, an obvious Almodóvar stand-in. Structurally, Pain and Glory is more of a sketchbook than a coherent set of reminiscences or confessions, and flashbacks to Salvador's childhood (featuring Penélope Cruz as the young boy's mother) mostly seem to fill in the spaces that, for a viewer, would be otherwise filled when Salvador nods off from smoking heroin.

There are implied coherences -- Salvador being precocious and rejecting religion early on, providing hints at his future life of "sin." But mostly Almodóvar organizes the film around Salvador's ailments, agoraphobia, and writer's block, all of which are periodically alleviated by his engagement with someone from his past. He tentatively patches things up with an actor from an early film (Asier Etxeandia) with whom he'd had a 32-year falling out; an old lover (Leonardo Sbaraglia) he'd lost to drugs many years prior; and his recollections about trying and partially failing to achieve rapprochement with his elderly mother (Julieta Serrano).

But in actuality, Almodóvar has constructed an inert picaresque, an ambling story focused on the drifting needs and attention of someone who barely moves. More than once I thought of Jafar Panahi's complex, occasionally frustrating Closed Curtain, a similar self-examination by an artist who was both physically and creatively immobile. But of course, Panahi was under house arrest. Our Almodóvar manqué has a bad back, and trouble swallowing. But Pain and Glory almost makes these health problems incidental. Mostly he's just churlish and constitutionally dyspeptic, content to live inside his immaculate apartment, and his own memories.