Is Pedro Almodóvar capable of making a self-critical film?

The new movie by Pedro Almodóvar connects with Pain and Glory (2019) in its autobiographical inspiration. We find ourselves once again with a film featuring a director as the protagonist, although here in a dual role. Barbara Lennie She embodies Elsa, a cult filmmaker, a migraine sufferer, and haunted by her mother's death. This character, in a story within a story, is at the heart of a new screenplay being written by a filmmaker named Raúl, played by Leonardo Sbaraglia. In the film's first part, Almodóvar revels in his familiar imagery without injecting any new energy, and doubts arise from the images. Is the director from La Mancha aware that the reflection of himself shown to us by Elsa and Raúl isn't particularly flattering? Could there be a touch of artifice in his insistence on making Chavela Vargas a trigger for emotion? How is it that the best sequence in this segment is a striptease The male lead, directed by Patrick Criado, reminds us of Almodóvar's torrid early work? And is he clear that he's portraying his partner first as a pure object of desire and then (in the skin of Quim Gutiérrez) as a mere caregiver?

Especially from the scene of an argument in a park between Raúl and his assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), the best part of the film, Bitter Christmas It delves into an increasingly uncompromising autofiction, to the point that we can reread what we have seen so far from a much more interesting perspective. The director sets aside the usual discourses surrounding the positive effects of art to highlight the vampiric and manipulative nature of the creator in relation to the lives and emotions of those around him. Pedro Almodóvar's final confession becomes one of the most frank and heartbreaking reflections on the artist as someone who obeys no other mandate than that of creation.