Summary
An aging filmmaker, who has taken a years long hiatus from directing, re-examines his life as he reconnects with the people and memories that are dredged up from his past when his old breakout film is given a 30 year remastering and special screening.
The Film
“Pain & Glory” was one of my most looked forward to films of 2019. I haven’t seen a ton of Pedro Almodovar’s films but “Volver” was such a sweet, serious, humorous, and life affirming film that I knew I had to see the film that had won Best Actor (Antonio Banderas, “The Skin I Live In”) and been nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
As soon as the film started, I knew I was in for exactly what I was hoping for. A beautiful nostalgic scene of a boy accompanying his mother, Jacinta (Penelope Cruz, “Everybody Knows”) as she does laundry on the riverbank along with other women in their village. As they drape the clean laundry over the reeds, bullrushes, and tall grass to dry in the sun, Jacinta and the women sing beautifully if unprofessionally together in the sunlight. Now, cut to that same boy, now grown up, holding his breath at the bottom of a pool, camera lingering on a long scar running up his torso before he emerges from the water and breathes in. Thus, we are introduced to Salvador Mallo, the filmmaker protagonist of the film, in all his solitude, nostalgia, memory, happiness, and pain.
These opening scenes capture Almodovar’s perfect ability to convey through the screen the simultaneous experience of joy and sorrow, contentment and dissatisfaction, and pain and glory. These sort of juxtapositions happening on the screen are actually fairly easy for a filmmaker to accomplish. Most film students are able to edit together contradictory shots. What is unique amongst the greats, of whom I do think Almodovar is one, is their ability to prompt an audience to internalize these feelings not just as an emotion they are watching but as an emotion they are feeling and taking part in themselves.
After watching “Pain & Glory,” I had the pleasure of leading, along with Seth Steele, a discussion group on the film. People walked away with lots of different ideas about ‘what the director intended’ but one thing was abundantly clear; not a person in the room was unaffected by it.
So, let’s get into the meat of the film; themes and character. I mention them both at once because there are realized and explored together in the film much the same as we ourselves realize the themes of our lives even as we live them and develop our personalities and characters in conjunction with the experiences that shape both the meaning of our lives and the core of our being.
In “Pain & Glory” the themes that are explored are many and unfolding so that in the beginning, while we seem to be spending a lot of time with Salvador as he entreats an actor to join him on stage for a Director Q&A, tries heroin for the first time, and goes back and forth with his agent/manager, we might think that the main themes of the film will be addiction, work, and conflict within the artistic process. Surely those themes are explored throughout but the turn of theme toward memory and the purpose that art plays in the inner life of the artist really comes to the forefront in the latter half of the film as Salvador is unable to feel that he has confronted the events of the past and their meanings in his life because he is no longer able to make a film about them.
To be honest, as an artist myself, I have actually not thought much about the role art plays in my life before the last year and even then, not much at all. Seeing Almodovar probe these sorts of thoughts in his own pseudo-biographical way has stayed with me and will for years I think, because it has me thinking about my art not just as something that I do or that has something to say to others but also as something that has a purpose in my own life, helping me process memory and feelings, leaving behind the pains of my past, and finding meaning and life within them.
In this way, I think this film would be relatable to anyone, not just the artist, since we all look for ways to square our experiences with understanding or find some catharsis in our pain. There are few longings as core to the human experience as this and few tragedies as heartrending as a life that has found no expression for this longing. The search for resolution, when goner unanswered, is a black hole of despair and anxiety that seems never to relent its grip one iota.
It seems that, to Almodovar, the answer to this longing is art which allows the burdened to release their weight and allow it to roll into the grave. As a Christian, I think this is one of the reasons I am personally drawn to art. Because it is the closest thing to prayer, spirituality, meditation, or religion that many will ever know and I hesitate to even say that they are, at times at least, different at all.
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