Here’s something you don’t see every day at the cinema: a filmmaker tells a boring story, then makes the whole point of the film about telling a boring story. Pedro Almodóvar is known for busy, gymnastic storytelling that can sometimes be so heightened it borders, in his own words, on “hysteria”. So maybe it’s logical that, here, he’s come round to the reverse of that – a kind of anti-story featuring storytellers who are not that good at stories.
One of Almodóvar’s many projects, when he’s not mixing together his favourite, fervid elements (sordidness, mothers, love, death, ruthlessness, hedonism, beauty, pansexuality, town v. country, snazzy colour schemes, etc), is to explore what he calls “autofiction”. That is, fiction about himself. Pain and Glory (2019) was a reasonably energetic account of a film director not unlike Almodóvar, and this time we get a version of that on tranquillisers plus two directors not unlike Almodóvar.
In 2004, a filmmaker called Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), after a long absence from features, is trying to put together her third movie. She has an undramatic life, centred around mild ailments, a dullish boyfriend (Patrick Criado) and a couple of unhappy close friends. Her story, in fact, is being concocted in 2026 by another director, the middle-aged Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who also yearns to get back into movies after a five-year absence from a renowned career. He, too, has little going on in his life beyond his dusty keyboard, his long-term boyfriend and the kind of loyal female assistant who has cropped up more than once in Almodóvar films since at least 1990.
So that’s two story levels. We see snatches of what Elsa imagines might be in her story, so that’s three. And the Russian doll of realities becomes four if we log that Raúl is an obvious alter ego of the ageing, tiring Almodóvar himself. At which point we might wonder if Almodóvar has all along been the Sacha Baron Cohen-style figment of someone else’s imagination on another level still.
The first hour of the film is wilfully dull and conflict-free, centred on the fictional story of Elsa that is refusing to rev up on Raúl’s MacBook. It centres on the kind of narrative byways Almodóvar has always enjoyed – sequences with medics, pointless social events and above all performances. There’s an extended male striptease where Elsa hooks up with her boyfriend, a fireman and hen-party entertainer.
And there are two fine song sequences – one focused on the tearful faces of Elsa and her friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo) as they listen to the ultra-woeful, cracked-earth voice of the great Mexican singer Chavela Vargas. Almodóvar has said that actors shouldn’t cry too much on screen, but helpfully suspends that rule here. Chavela’s version of “Amarga Navidad” gives the film its title. There’s little humour throughout, beyond a nurse not knowing what a “cult film” is, plus a sideswipe at Netflix.
In the second half, we understand why the first half was such a snoozer. Elsa and Patricia head off for a break to Lanzarote as Patricia worries that her husband is having an affair. The two have a bust-up when Elsa confesses, with surprising candour, that Patricia’s private life will be an inspiration for her script. So that means Raúl’s script is picking up a bit. But Raúl realises he needs some life larceny of his own and seizes on an off-screen death adjacent to his assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). This turns Elsa into something of a bereavement counsellor towards a new guest she’s invited to the Canaries, a shattered young woman called Natalia (Milena Smit).
“I need to film!” is Raúl’s defence of his grief-jacking when reproached by a furious Mónica. She and Raúl’s boyfriend Santi (Quim Gutiérrez) then offer notes on his script and how to zhuzh it up, and these offer hope that Raúl might finally get his full writing mojo back, though disappointingly we don’t get to see the notes enacted in the Elsa plane of events.
So Bitter Christmas takes us once more down the Almodóvarian rabbit hole of creativity, and the intoxicating (or toxic) nature of it, aided as ever by drugs (just like Alice’s plunge into made-up places). But there aren’t the dope highs, the lustfulness, the scheming and cheesy co-incidences of its nearest companion, Pain and Glory, nor the Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz of it all. The cast here is steady and grounded, without canny ploys forever flashing, Banderas-like, from their eyes. (Leonardo Sbaraglia appeared in that earlier film as Banderas’s vintage lover.)
As usual, composer Alberto Iglesias adds urgent, scribbling strings at humdrum moments, and a new cinematographer for Almodóvar, Pau Esteve Birba, creates more depth and visual nuance than we’re perhaps used to, plus more pastels to go with the obligatory scarlets and poison greens.
Almodóvar’s brand of cynical sentimentality and fatalistic hope never gives up the ghost, though the pleasures are more intellectual than emotional this time. The director sees his films exhibiting “greater sobriety and restraint” these days, as he told Film Quarterly in 2023. Much of the drama here comes from people telling others what they’re planning to commit to a computer. Yet the urchin ethic of old – life is for living, thieving and redeeming – can still be found in this, the man of La Mancha’s 24th professional feature.
