In reviews from Cannes, critics describe Pedro Almodóvar’s “Bitter Christmas” as a late-career film built around filmmaking within filmmaking. All accounts say the movie follows a writer-director who struggles with creative block and writes—then rewrites—a screenplay about a similarly troubled filmmaker. Other parts of the film reportedly shift to earlier characters and timelines, creating parallel narratives that raise questions about how stories are formed and whose lives get drawn into fiction. Several reviewers note that the film includes a meta-fictional structure in which characters and events echo one another, including alter egos of the director and story elements recognized by other characters. Variety emphasizes the playful nesting of stories within stories and alter egos within alter egos, while The Guardian highlights themes of grief, loss, and what it calls artistic betrayal when fictional characters are based on real people. Deadline frames the film as Almodóvar “channeling himself,” blending ideas about art-making with more pain than “glory.” IndieWire characterizes the experience as fun and twisty. Across sources, the film is described as personal, self-referential, and complex, with some reviewers suggesting it can feel slightly muddled despite its engagement.
Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Bitter Christmas’ weaves nested stories about filmmaking and grief
In reviews from Cannes, critics describe Pedro Almodóvar’s “Bitter Christmas” as a late-career film built around filmmaking within filmmaking. All accounts say the movie follows a writer-director who...
- The film is presented as a meta-drama with stories within stories about filmmaking.
- A writer-director character experiences creative block and writes/rewrites a screenplay about a filmmaker.
- The narrative includes parallel timelines involving people from earlier years, connected to the screenplay.
- Themes discussed across reviews include grief, loss, and the consequences of turning real people into fictional characters.
- Reviewers describe the film as playful but complex, with some noting it may feel slightly muddled.
Cannes film festival: Spaniard’s latest life-v-art auto-metafiction feels slightly muddled as he directs a director directing a directorWith its rich, warm, summery colours, nothing could surely be less bitter or less Christmassy than this film. It’s the latest from Cannes competition regular Pedro Almodóvar, partly set during Christmas; the female lead actually complains about the yuletide traffic at one stage. But there’s no tinsel or sleigh bells or shopping for presents. Like Die Hard, it eludes classification. It is another – which is to say, yet another – double-layered creation by Almodóvar, a kind of movie auto-metafiction of the sort that he has virtually invented, a life-v-art dialectical process that he is evidently unable to do without.Like the recent Pain and Glory, Bitter Christmas is a candidly personal movie, circling around ideas like grief, loss, the vampirism of art and the betrayal involved in basing fictional characters on real people. Perhaps by emphasising this last point, Almodóvar is pre-empting or cauterising a crisis in his own life, showing us a gay male artist’s perspective on the question of whether women are not being given enough credit as the wellspring for inspiration or indeed as artists themselves. The result is a complex, slightly muddled, almost surreally modernist noir-melodrama or open-ended telenovela of the sort he habitually offers. Almodóvar always alchemises the real-unreal duality into something watchable, although perhaps he is going over old ground. Bitter Christmas, incidentally, features what for arthouse movies is becoming mandatory, the haughty anti-Netflix gag, even though the film does feel like streaming TV in some ways. Continue reading...
3 months agoCannes: A tortured filmmaker writes — and re-writes — a screenplay about a tortured filmmaker in this satisfying late-career gem from the Spanish giant.
3 months agoEarly in Pedro Almodóvar’s new film “Bitter Christmas,” a female filmmaker is briefly hospitalized, and the attending physician recognizes her as the director of an offbeat film from some years before. “I hear it became a cult film,” says the good doctor. “What does that mean? Cult? Evangelical?” It’s a good question. The films of […]
3 months agoPedro Almodóvar has never shied away from making movies close to himself and the act of making movies themselves. With his latest, Bitter Christmas, he creates the parallel stories of a successful writer-director who is experiencing creative block, and a group of people 22 years earlier who may or not figure into his latest screenplay. […]
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