Pain and Glory

Pedro Almodóvar– 2019 – Spain

Pedro Almodóvar is one of the handful of greatest directors alive, one of the last true auteurs; meaning, someone who created his own genre, whose films exude his personality and reflect his philosophy, and who embeds every film, no matter how unique, with his visual signature. Intensely personal and yet universal in its concern, Dolor y gloria / Pain and Glory introduces a veteran film director, Salvador Mallo, played by long-time Almodóvar star Antonio Banderas. Living in Madrid, Mallo is 60-ish and suffering from a chronic illness that makes pain a constant part of his life, so much that it has helped him feel in tune with his own body like nothing else ever has. It has also hindered his creativity. The film is partly about his struggle to reconnect with his art form, and partly about his attempt to reconcile his past and present. Reveries take him back to his childhood in the Spanish countryside, where his mother (Penelope Cruz) was a goddess-like influence on him. This pull of sensibilities, the dichotomy between cosmopolitan life, with its tolerance for atheism and homosexuality, and the conservative warmth of traditional family life in rural areas is recurrent in Almodóvar’s films. His heart is in both places; that’s the source of his pain and also the acorn of his art, in which his characters also blossom in the city and yet are never quite free of the nostalgia that draws them home to the very villages they once found it necessary to escape. Almodóvar’s seemingly effortless blend of melodrama and comedy has always been a hallmark of his greatest films. Pain and Glory is, in contrast, possibly his most sedate and reflective work to date, but no less beautiful, poignant and edifying. It's the best film I saw from 2019.