Newport This Week

‘Pain and Glory’ is Almodóvar in Top Form

FILM REVIEW


Antonio Banderas gives one of his best-ever performances in Pedro Almodóvar’s semi-autobiographical “Pain and Glory,” opening January 17 at the Jane Pickens Theater.

Antonio Banderas gives one of his best-ever performances in Pedro Almodóvar’s semi-autobiographical “Pain and Glory,” opening January 17 at the Jane Pickens Theater.

This latest from the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is the filmmaker’s best and most personal movie in years, a bittersweet meditation on life and art that’s reminiscent of Fellini’s “8 1/2.”

Antonio Banderas plays Almodóvar’s stand-in, a Madrid-based movie director called Salvador Mallo, as he revisits his childhood and his memories of his mother, and as he examines the obstacles, physical and emotional, that have blocked his creativity.

It’s a treat to see Banderas in this role. He’s been one of Almodóvar’s favorite actors, going all the way back to “Labyrinth of Passion” (1982) and Matador (1986) up to Almodovar’s 2013 misfire “I’m So Excited!” In “Pain and Glory,” the handsome but grizzled Banderas’s Mallo has not made a film in some time.

He’s beset by health issues, the pain of the title, which range from headaches and back problems to a persistent choking. This drives him to self-medicate, first by crushing painkillers and then, after he reunites with actor friend Alberto Crespo (an excellent Asier Etxeandia) from the old days, with heroin. Mallo’s increasing dependence on smoking the drug to relive his pain takes him further away from the work that sits unfinished on his laptop, including an autobiographical story-in-progress called “Addiction.”

Loren King is an arts and entertainment writer whose work appears regularly in The Boston Globe and other publications.

Loren King is an arts and entertainment writer whose work appears regularly in The Boston Globe and other publications.

Crespo persuades Mallo to let the actor perform the piece as a monologue onstage, leading to one of the film’s most affecting and memorable scenes. Mallo gets a surprise visit at home from his onetime lover Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who figures prominently in “Addiction” and who long ago moved to Argentina. During a long, tender conversation, both men are whisked, along with the audience, between the past and present. It’s a wistful, masterful scene.

All the beloved Almodóvar flourishes are present in “Pain and Glory,” the popping colors and irreverent tone, the homages to cinema, but it’s all tempered by a mature self-awareness that makes the film so emotionally satisfying.

There are flashbacks to Mallo’s boyhood in the provinces, with his mother Jacinta, played as a young woman by another Almodóvar favorite, Penelope Cruz. The actress has starred in many Almodóvar films, including two of his best, “Volver” (2006) and “All About My Mother” (1999). Cruz brings sensuality and intelligence to Jacinta who fights for her gifted son to get the education that will take him far from the village of Valencia but free him from a provincial life and manual labor.

In Valencia, Salvador (played as a boy by Asier Flores) and his parents live in a “cave,” with a single skylight that opens high into the blue sky, a recurring motif. Unlike most in the poor village, Salvador can read and write. His mother barters with a young, illiterate laborer, Eduardo (César Vicente), who makes their cave more livable by whitewashing the walls and affixing colorful tiles to them in exchange for Salvador’s gentle but taxing reading lessons. Late in the film there is an exquisite, pivotal scene of Salvador’s sexual and artistic awakening that Mallo understands only in the present, when the memory has come full circle.

Almodóvar has made two other movies about film directors: 1987’s “Law of Desire” and 2004’s “Bad Education.” As original and memorable as these films are, “Pain and Glory” is more satisfying as a subdued, visually rich but not showy character study seasoned with age. Longtime Almodóvar collaborator Alberto Iglesias contributes a brilliant score and cinematographer José Luis Alcaine delivers stunning color choreography of interiors and exteriors.

There is the recurring image of water in “Pain and Glory.” The film opens with Mallo, his eyes closed, submerged in a swimming pool, and then cuts to him as a boy watching his mother alongside other village women as they wash clothes in a river and sing. When Crespo recites Mallo’s memoir, it includes his boyhood memories of outdoor movie screenings in the summer heat. We see a cavalcade of images that include waterfalls, rivers and lakes, with actresses like Natalie Wood and Marilyn Monroe swimming or sunning themselves. It’s a homage to cinema and to memory.

As Martin Scorsese did with “The Irishman,” Almodóvar fills this late-career masterwork with all his obsessions, including cinema, his mother, other women in his life and sexuality. But he layers them with the contemplation and melancholy of an older artist reflecting on his life, without sentimentality but with soulfulness.

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