AMARGA NAVIDAD
An advertising director faces a turbulent Christmas weekend. 20 years later, a filmmaker turns her story into a screenplay, blurring the lines between reality, fiction and the people closest to him.
2004: Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) was once a filmmaker, but after two failures, has turned to advertising. She seeks to persuade one friend, Patricia (Victoria Luengo), to finally abandon her cheating husband, and reaches out to another friend, Natalia (Milena Smit), who is in agony over having lost a child. Elsa also has a loyal and much younger boyfriend, Bonifacio (Patrick Criado) - a firefighter who moonlights as a stripper. But these people are figments of Raul’s (Leonardo Sbaraglia) imagination, who is searching listlessly for the key to his next movie, only to settle on tearing a page from the real-life travails of his loyal assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). One narrative nests within another; Raúl’s story, set in 2026, is “real” life, while Elsa’s, which takes place in 2004, is his creation. But he doesn’t seem to realize that other people’s life experiences aren’t ripe for the taking, and his insistence on doing so becomes a metaphor for the selfishness of artistic creation. Almodóvar leaps between the two stories with breathtaking fluidity, and brings them both to a virtuosic finish.
‘Bitter Christmas’ is full of Almodóvar’s obsessions: striking-looking women, with wilful, complicated characters to play; vivid colour combinations in both production and costume design; all facets of love, from maternal devotion to forbidden sexual desire; the mysterious source of human creativity; and impressive music set pieces, of which there are magnificent examples here. (Subtitles)
Spain 2026 Pedro Almodóvar 111m
