Bitter Christmas: Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘witty and sensitive mea culpa’

Pedro Almodóvar has explored his own profession before, said Helen O’Hara in Empire, notably in “Pain and Glory”, in which Antonio Banderas starred as a suffering film director. But, in his new movie, in which he looks at the way artists cannibalise the lives of those around them – to the detriment, perhaps, of their own relationships – there is an added sense of self-flagellation.

The film opens over Christmas in 2004, with Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a sometime filmmaker and commercials director, being hospitalised with an appalling migraine. Fortunately, she has a supportive boyfriend (Patrick Criado), a firefighter who moonlights as a stripper. We later learn, however, that Elsa is actually the fictional creation of Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), an urbane filmmaker who is drawing heavily on incidents in his own life, and that of his long-time female assistant (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón).

A “witty and sensitive mea culpa”, the film will delight Almodóvar fans, said Vanessa Thorpe in The Observer. While the tension between fiction and reality is a theme, “Bitter Christmas” is also an examination of profound grief, and a “belated, guilty tribute to all the older women who do much of the caring and facilitating of artists’ lives”.

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This drama has many fine qualities, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times, but its postmodernist structure drains it of a certain “emotional weight”. At times, it “feels like an exercise: a challenge the director has set for himself”. And yet, Almodóvar still delivers an “attractive package”: the shots “flow with poetic discipline”; the locations are bleakly beautiful. Even when he is coasting, Almodóvar “cannot help but charm and entertain”.