We have always seen glimpses of Pedro Almodóvar in his films. Most notably in Law of Desire (1987) and Bad Education (2004), he has used stories of filmmakers in a self-reflective way to construct deeply fractured, challenging, and eclectic experiences. His most recent work Pain and Glory (2019), on the other hand – especially with its final twist that ensures the continuity of its film-within-a-film to its overarching narrative – is something far more inward-looking and self-contained. 

His earlier movies narrated by screenwriter or director figures – Law of Desire, Bad Education, and Broken Embraces (2009) – are defined by what Andrew Chan describes as ‘an overflow of narrative’. They feature a freeing and postmodern attitude towards the film text, often blending the creative works of their protagonists with the films themselves. This allows the viewer the isolated pleasure of a typical linear storyline while also allowing for a space of digression and self-referentiality. 

Courtesy of: Sony Pictures Releasing International

These movies gesture towards autofiction by featuring a director figure who constantly revises the film in front of us, breaking down the distinctions between fiction and reality. These avatars come from a similar social background to Almodóvar; they create similar works, including the ones we are watching – yet they are used to distance the films from their ultimate author, Almodóvar himself.

Law of Desire’s Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) and Enrique (Fele Martinez) in Bad Education are both highly stoic, inaccessible characters who teach us little about Almodóvar because their only purpose is to create art that reflects the array of crazed lovers and fake identities that surround them. Cinema is the way in which they make sense of these circumstances, so we must assume it is Almodóvar’s favoured method too. The process of filmmaking may help him to understand the world, but the layers upon layers of fiction are a shield that prevent us from ever knowing the man behind the camera.

Courtesy of: Warner Sogefilms

Cinema is an artform of performance and freedom for Almodóvar, allowing new identities and experiences to be explored. Juan, the inverted femme fatale figure portrayed by Gael García Bernal in Bad Education is the perfect example of this. He first visits Enrique’s studio (supposedly) as Enrique’s childhood friend and crush Ignacio, with a script he has written about their experiences at an abusive catholic school. In the following visualisation of “The Visit”, we see Juan (who insists on being called Ángel) playing the role of a transgender drag queen named Zahara who was assigned the name Ignacio at birth. In a plot that is surely one of the most complex and confusing in modern cinema, it is revealed that Juan is actually Ignacio’s brother attempting to trick Enrique. Juan is also being blackmailed by the abusive priest Father Manalo, another person who is obscuring his identity.

I’ve seen the movie a few times and it remains a disconcerting watch. Nevertheless, Almodóvar uses everything cinema has to offer to explore these different perspectives, using different aspect ratios and a more high-contrast, lucid style of cinematography to differentiate the flashbacks and alternate narratives. There is perhaps some levity given to the very real issue of institutional abuse by placing it in this stylised mode: it becomes Enrique’s telling of the story rather than Almodóvar’s. By using the framing device of the film-within-a-film, Bad Education becomes a study of how we tell narratives and share our cultural history. We see not only the finished movie, ready for its audience, but the man behind it, and his motivations, all filtered through various levels of reality and fictionality.

Courtesy of: Warner Sogefilms

While the sheer excesses of Bad Education make it the most difficult and distancing of these experiments, its extreme fluidity is a useful prism in which to view the other films, which also struggle to retain a single continuity. More interesting still are the scenes and themes that repeat throughout the others, such as the transgender character confronting an abusive priest in Law of Desire, as well as the director’s childhood in a catholic school repeated in Pain and Glory, albeit in a less distressing context. Almodóvar has stated that he was not a victim of this abuse, but attests that this concern stems from his experience of ‘an education that’s based on punishment and guilt’. 

Most of these connections are delicate and specific. The flashbacks of Pain and Glory’s Salvador singing for catholic priests echo a scene in Bad Education which contrasts the innocent child Ignacio singing “Moon River” with the rampant abuse that surrounds him. This sequence is itself a recontextualization of a song created for a different movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), furthering this sense of Almodóvar as a postmodern artist who uses self-awareness, referentiality, and a deconstruction of traditional forms to create meaning.

Courtesy of: Sony Pictures Releasing International

Using cultural touchstones in order to subvert their emotional connotations has always been a powerful tool in Almodóvar’s arsenal. In the earlier film Audrey Hepburn’s character sings while longing for a quieter life, and Bad Education subverts this escapism by placing the children in a rural idyll that fails to offer respite from the priests who constantly undermine their duty to protect them. The song becomes inescapably suffused with irony. 

Where once Almodóvar’s autofiction was defined by its chameleonic playing with identity and fictionality, Pain and Glory finds a more settled and honest perspective for his self-reflection. His tone is controlled and patient, speaking of his/his protagonist’s past in a nostalgic but humble way. The movie’s structure illustrates a coming-of-age cultivated by movies, and traces a web of themes and stories intricately connected with Almodóvar’s films and life. If you add to these autobiographical flourishes a director-protagonist explicitly modelled on Almodóvar (including the puffy hair and an identical recreation of his apartment), then we might say that his life and his art have reached a rather mature synthesis.

Courtesy of: Sony Pictures Releasing International

Almodóvar himself has denied the film’s status as “autofiction”, stating in Film Comment that Pain and Glory ‘starts with me and becomes a very elaborated fiction’. The central figure of the movie, Antonio Banderas’s Salvador, deals with concerns that are clearly the director’s own: fears over being too ill to direct anymore, nostalgia for Madrid’s counterculture movement, a coinciding sense of loss and need to search inward to produce cinema. Almodóvar’s slight but important distinction signals what is so brilliant about the movie: it occupies a realm of self-reflection without seeming narcissistic or closed off from the world. 

Almodóvar’s earlier autofiction used frenetic genre experiments to distance us from his more reserved director figures, but with this movie he embraces a minimalism that shrinks the gulf between this avatar and himself. Antonio Banderas’s exquisite portrayal of the ageing Salvador Mallo features one bluntly confessional sequence which sees him listing all of his illnesses aided by lucid medical illustrations and a candid narrational style, as if they are so numerous that the film must shift aesthetically to describe them all. Elsewhere, he is seen visiting doctors, wandering aimlessly around his apartment, and lingering restlessly in his bed. He tries to reconcile himself with the past and his previous relationships, both romantic and familial. In his growing list of self-insert heroes, Almodóvar finds in Salvador the most reserve and the most anguish.

Courtesy of: Sony Pictures Releasing International

Salvador is ultimately an analogous figure. He is not Almodóvar but he isn’t entirely distinct from him either. Through him, Almodóvar explores more intimately some of his perennial concerns such as his relationship with his mother and living life as a gay filmmaker in a post-fascist Madrid. He also uses this connection with his protagonist to create dialogue that is very knowing and self-aware. Delightful examples include a moment where his mother describes his work as autofiction because she read about it in a review, as well as Salvador warning about his script: ‘It’s a confessional text; I don’t want to be identified’. The same propensity existed in the earlier films, yet the director figures there could still be said to exist fully as fictional creations – catalysts for indirect self-exploration rather than the specific parallelism of the ‘alter-ego’ Salvador. 

The ending cements this in an incredibly profound way: the romantic flashbacks of Salvador’s childhood are slowly, through a reverse-tracking shot, revealed to be the film Salvador is currently creating, thereby providing a continuity and a pathos to the film-within-a-film that was not present in Almodóvar’s other autofiction. These are not disruptive memories anymore but the vital experiences of a life full of regret. As opposed to the jarring layers of autobiography in the previous films, everything here belongs to Salvador. 

Courtesy of: Sony Pictures Releasing International

If Pain and Glory’s sobering honesty feels like a kind of finality, then we can always hope to be mistaken. In any case, it represents one of the most grounded and affectionate self-portraits in the history of cinema: a humorous, passionate ode to the creation of art and the pain that sometimes comes with it. While Almodóvar may not admit to his own movies having the same ties to his life, his admission of the truth of many aspects of the film suggests otherwise. Perhaps what we see here is a recognition that, while his autofiction is often filtered through dense layers of fiction and drama, it has always been the lens through which he has been able to interrogate his passion as a filmmaker and a human being.