“Bitter Christmas” Is Pedro Almodóvar’s Gift to Us

It will surprise none of Pedro Almodóvar’s admirers to learn that his new film, “Bitter Christmas,” is a dizzyingly intricate meditation on the artist’s compulsion to spin truth into fiction. Or that there is a confessional aspect to the story, which borrows snippets from the director’s own life, though to what degrees of specificity and accuracy, only Almodóvar himself could fully know. He has long delighted in the medium’s twinned capacities for self-revelation and self-concealment, moving, over time, from the veiled personal allusions of “The Flower of My Secret” (1995), “Bad Education” (2004), and “Volver” (2006), among others, to the nakedly semi-autobiographical realm of “Pain and Glory” (2019). To an extent, Almodóvar invites comparison with other storytellers who have recently interrogated their compulsion to tell stories: the Steven Spielberg who plumbed his formative movie-love memories in “The Fabelmans” (2022), or the Joanna Hogg who chronicled her film-school experience in “The Souvenir” (2019) and “The Souvenir: Part II” (2021). Tellingly, though, those works were origin stories. For Almodóvar, now seventy-seven, the whole rich expanse of his life and career seems to be fair game.

And game is, indeed, the word; no living filmmaker pilfers from himself more playfully or prolifically. In “Bitter Christmas,” Almodóvar, perhaps in a burst of Yuletide generosity, has seen fit to give himself not one but two fictional alter egos. The first is Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a Madrid-based director who has two little-seen independent features under her belt and who now works mostly in advertising. What she brings to mind is not so much the porous boundaries between art and life but the inextricable nature of work and pleasure. Single-minded and hyper-observant, she seems hard pressed to enjoy anything unless it provides fuel for her next job. Early in the film, during a scene set in 2004, she and her close friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo) attend a strip show, where a bride-to-be and her friends—and, in all likelihood, the moviegoing audience—go weak-kneed at the sight of Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), a glistening hunk in iridescent undies. Does Elsa join them? She does not. Instead, she slips backstage and, with no more shame or hesitation than a sports writer would feel soliciting locker-room reactions, asks Bonifacio to star in an underwear commercial. Yet Elsa isn’t all business; there’s a spark to her that Bonifacio, despite some initial wariness, can’t resist. He does the commercial and falls in love with her, and she with him—at least, up to the point that her career will allow.

Almodóvar’s second, more obvious stand-in is Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a director who’s closer to his own age. We encounter him in Madrid, in 2026, and we soon realize that he and Elsa are inhabiting not only different time frames but separate narrative planes: Elsa is a character in a script that Raúl is writing, also titled “Bitter Christmas.” The images of Elsa that we see are, as ever with Almodóvar, impeccably composed and color-coördinated, yet they hail from a work in progress—a film within a film, taking shape in its maker’s mind. Elsa is Raúl’s creation, though they are both, of course, Almodóvar’s creations, in a film that amounts to a prismatic valentine to the art of creation. The result is like a stack of cinematic funnels, or perhaps a game of autofictional telephone: select aspects of Almodóvar’s life have been distilled into Raúl, and then further refined, or—depending on one’s perspective—complicated, embellished, and muddled into Elsa. When Elsa experiences panic attacks, accompanied by debilitating migraines, we are watching both Raúl and Almodóvar transmute details of their own medical histories into fiction. (Almodóvar, famously sensitive to light, wears dark sunglasses on nearly every occasion.)

The similarities swirl and multiply; so do the differences. Bonifacio is a dreamily, ridiculously idealized figure—a full-time firefighter who strips only on weekends—and, in the early introductory scenes, you sense both a flair for comic exaggeration and a weakness for exposition in what turns out to be Raúl’s writing. (One of the sly pleasures of Almodóvar’s elaborate meta-structure is that seemingly accidental flaws can later reveal themselves to be deliberate ones.) Bonifacio is also a calming, steadfast presence in Elsa’s life, and he looks after her with a heart-melting devotion that we see mirrored in Raúl’s younger partner, Santi (Quim Gutiérrez). Elsa is reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Middlesex,” which functions as both a temporal marker—in 2004, the novel is a recent literary phenomenon—and a sly wink at the gender-fluid sensibility that enables her to exist, on page and screen, as a vessel of Raúl’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Yet Elsa doesn’t have much time for reading; when she isn’t reeling from physical pain, she’s agonizing over her work. When she jets off, mid-film, to the black-sand beaches of Lanzarote, she admires the scenery for a moment or two and then spends hours hunched over her laptop, toiling at a script. Patricia, who’s come along to Lanzarote (and brought her young son), is miffed at her friend’s distractedness, but Elsa is minimally apologetic. Inspiration is rare, and has no respect for holidays.

Almodóvar evokes the intensity and excitement of the writing process with simple yet effective graphic tools: The opening titles are typed onto the screen, complete with a blinking cursor; Elsa’s thoughts and actions are sometimes anticipated by a line of onscreen text. The composer Alberto Iglesias, one of the director’s steadiest collaborators, provides more passionate flourishes—the strings of his score seem to shudder ecstatically, but also ominously, whenever Raúl approaches his laptop, and every thrum all but declares that writing is not only a generative act but a violent one.

When, at one point, Raúl snaps at Santi for bothering him while he’s trying to write, no writer could entirely blame him—especially as Raúl hasn’t made a film in five years. It’s perhaps the one detail that sets him apart from Almodóvar, who seldom lets even two years go by without rattling off a new picture. “Bitter Christmas” is his twenty-fourth feature, and, like “Pain and Glory,” it’s the work of a filmmaker at once wholly aware of his encroaching mortality—something referenced, continually, by his characters’ struggles with pain, infirmity, and loss—and yet stubbornly unwilling to let it derail his creative energies. Time will catch up with Almodóvar at some point, but writer’s block, it seems, never will.

Inspiration, though, can be treacherous, as it is first for Elsa, and then for Raúl, in one of the film’s many symmetrically conceived twists. Both Elsa and Raúl are compelled to write about other people’s personal tragedies, and the artistic gratification they feel is answered, almost immediately, by a stinging moral rebuke. Patricia doesn’t appreciate her marital troubles becoming grist for Elsa’s creative mill, and Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), Raúl’s longtime assistant, is enraged at how blithely he appropriates her friend’s recent trauma for his fiction. “I know you need to film, but not everything is for you to use,” she snarls, with the fearlessness of a close confidante—a role that, it soon becomes clear, might also transform her into Raúl’s most dangerous enemy.

Raúl protests that his borrowings from reality will be so thoroughly intermingled with fiction as to be unrecognizable to the viewer—a case that Almodóvar, in interviews, has made in his own defense. And yet it is also Almodóvar who, in a spirit of self-interrogation, gifts Mónica with an equally shrewd rebuttal: “You can lie in life but not when you write,” she fires back at Raúl. “You’re more honest in your scripts than in your life.” The accusation echoes of one of the most memorable lines in Almodóvar’s “All About My Mother” (1999), when a character says, “You are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed you are.” It’s the skeleton key that unlocks all Almodóvar’s hidden meanings: the greatest of all truths can be found in artifice, and in art.

It’s significant that the most vividly drawn and intensely felt relationships in “Bitter Christmas” are between friends and colleagues, not lovers. Bonifacio and Santi are supportive to the point of subservience, whereas the arguments between Elsa and Patricia—and especially between Raúl and Mónica—linger and bruise. It’s bracing to see a film so comfortable with anger, one that’s in no hurry to smooth over every disagreement or forgive every betrayal. Almodóvar knows that secrets and words can be weapons, and that, in an instant, the closest of friends can become the most cruelly estranged. Is it unfair to suggest that he writes, more than ever, from personal experience? Watching the film, I couldn’t help but flash back to well-documented instances of the director falling out—not forever, happily—with some of his best and most prominent collaborators, the actors Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas among them. Almodóvar’s decades-long body of work is a staggering history of long-term artistic relationships that have been forged, sustained, ruptured, and sometimes reconciled through cinema.

The ugly side of friendship puts the bitterness in “Bitter Christmas.” But the title itself refers to a classic song that, as performed here by the Costa Rican and Mexican artist Chavela Vargas, amounts to the sweetest of affirmations. Vargas, who died in 2012, was a friend of Almodóvar’s, and her songs recur throughout his work, though seldom so vividly. In one crucial sequence, Elsa and Patricia, hanging out at the latter’s apartment, listen to Vargas’s recordings of “La Llorona” and “Bitter Christmas” and find themselves moved to tears. The performances we hear were recorded toward the end of Vargas’s life, and their raw emotion is amplified rather than diminished by the singer’s cracked, throaty delivery; Patricia, in particular, is so overcome that the music, and the sense of bleak regret that it imparts, inspires her to make a momentous decision about her future. The glory of Almodóvar’s film is that it knows art doesn’t merely imitate life; fashioned by the right hands, and received in the proper spirit, it can change it, too. ♦