Bitter Christmas review – grief, loss and artistic betrayal in Almodóvar’s film within a film

W ith its rich, warm, summery colours, nothing could surely be less bitter or less Christmassy than this film. It’s the latest from Cannes competition regular Pedro Almodóvar , partly set during Christmas; the female lead actually complains about the yuletide traffic at one stage. But there’s no tinsel or sleigh bells or shopping for presents.

Like Die Hard, it eludes classification. It is another – which is to say, yet another – double-layered creation by Almodóvar, a kind of movie auto-metafiction of the sort that he has virtually invented, a life-v-art dialectical process that he is evidently unable to do without. Like the recent Pain and Glory , Bitter Christmas is a candidly personal movie, circling around ideas like grief, loss, the vampirism of art and the betrayal involved in basing fictional characters on real people. Perhaps by emphasising this last point, Almodóvar is pre-empting or cauterising a crisis in his own life, showing us a gay male artist’s perspective on the question of whether women are not being given enough credit as the wellspring for inspiration or indeed as artists themselves. The result is a complex, slightly muddled, almost surreally modernist noir-melodrama or open-ended telenovela of the sort he habitually offers. Almodóvar always alchemises the real-unreal duality into something watchable, although perhaps he is going over old ground. Bitter Christmas, incidentally, features what for arthouse movies is becoming mandatory, the haughty anti-Netflix gag, even though the film does feel like streaming TV in some ways. In the mid-2000s, an era of fliptop phones, Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) is a struggling indie film-maker now reduced to shooting TV ads; her younger boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado) is a firefighter and part-time lapdancer whom she met at a club on a hen night when she went backstage to offer him the lead in her upcoming underpants commercial. Elsa, and maybe Almodóvar himself, are unmoved by the fact that this would be tricky behaviour if the gender roles were reversed. Elsa has friends who are plagued with problems: Patricia (Victoria Luengo) has to deal with a young son while her husband is away on business trips where he is cheating on her, and Natalia (played by Milena Smit, from Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers ) is profoundly depressed by the loss of her young son. And Elsa herself is depressed, struggling with a new autobiographical script and stricken with psychosomatic migraines and panic attacks after the death of her mother. Having fallen out with Patricia, Elsa shares a holiday villa in Lanzarote with Natalia where her artistic vision and relationship with the absent Bonifacio comes to a crisis.

Key points

• Like Die Hard, it eludes classification.
• It is another – which is to say, yet another – double-layered creation by Almodóvar, a kind of movie auto-metafiction of the sort that he has virtually invented, a life-v-art dialectical process th…
• Like the recent Pain and Glory , Bitter Christmas is a candidly personal movie, circling around ideas like grief, loss, the vampirism of art and the betrayal involved in basing fictional characters…
• Perhaps by emphasising this last point, Almodóvar is pre-empting or cauterising a crisis in his own life, showing us a gay male artist’s perspective on the question of whether women are not being g…
• The result is a complex, slightly muddled, almost surreally modernist noir-melodrama or open-ended telenovela of the sort he habitually offers.