They say that films about mothers and first loves are usually a prerequisite of debutantes, directors too green to find any sort of inspiration for their films outside of their immediate life experience – which, it goes without saying, is limited. It’s a foil for a film such as Pain and Glory, Pedro Almodóvar’s most recent film (a director whose career spans almost four decades), which is a very touching and charming counterpoint to such arguments – it’s a film about a mother and the legacy of her maternal love beyond her death, a film about one’s first great love and the scars left behind by the choice of letting go of it in favor of one’s own survival, and, beyond anything, it’s a film about the past and the realization of one’s own fragility in the face of time.

Salvador Mallo, the film’s alter-ego protagonist (in a crowning role by Antonio Baneras, one of Almodóvar’s closest collaborators) is a director that has grown old and fragile at the behest of constant migraines and paralyzing sciatica pains, which lead him to live a life of self-imposed reclusion, in his flamboyant apartment in central Madrid (which seems to be a replica of Almodóvar’s own living quarters, which, along with the hairstyle and clothes sported here by Banderas, seem to underline the need to identify the character with the director himself).

Depressed and stuck in a harrowing creative block, Salvador sinks deeper and deeper into his own memories, regrets and unfulfilled dreams. These dives into his own psyche lead to a Proustian process of revisiting the past, which comes under the shape of a film within the film, which sometimes unfold onto the screen itself – scenes like housewives washing clothes in a river in midsummer, singing flamenco, or memories of the time when he discovered his own vocal talents during an audition for the catholic school choir, or the reading lessons he gave in the scorching afternoon sun to a young craftsman who would cause the then-child an inexplicable, feverish desire.

All these fragments, bathed into honey-colored lights, allow certain tensions to shine through the cuts, such as the ones between the religiously-motivated moral values that Salvador was taught at home and at school, and his own inclinations and choices. These tensions reflect themselves across the years, especially in his relationship with his mother, who loves him unconditionally, yet dies resenting him as an adult and as a man ( “You never were a good son”, says at one point Jacinta to an already-mature Salvador).

Upon closer inspection, what’s brought to the fore in these sequences are more than memories brought to life, they’re idealized reveries of the past, set into contrast with a present that is defined by loneliness and sickness. In Penelope Cruz’s performance, the younger mother becomes a character that is larger than life, the Liz Taylor (Salvador’s favorite at the age of eight) of his life, who gradually loses her fascinating glow in the small and grey-haired figure of Julieta Serrano, who performs Jacinta in her old age.

Salvador’s dive into memory is also precipitated by his meeting with Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), the lead actor in one of his first successful films, one that was launched in the ’80s, El Sabor. Feeling anxious about a gala screening that’s been set to celebrate the restoration of the film by the Spanish Cinematheque, Salvador decides to show up uninvited at Alberto’s house, who is living his days as a bygone actor with a heroin addiction, the two of them having been out of contact ever since they stopped shooting the film many years ago. In spite of this long period of silence, the two manage to strike up a sort of domestic intimacy, wherein both men feel the need of reciprocal camaraderie, a need which is doubled by some more or less painful jabs at their unresolved past disputes. Even so, the two cling to each other and pull themselves through their own bi-lateral creative crises, wading through heroin smoke and memories of their youth in the Madrid of the eighties, a city ravaged by addiction – to which Alberto renounces himself, while Salvador gives up hope as his first true love succumbs to it (a story which sets the basis of a theatre play written by Salvador who decides to remain uncredited, which will artistically resuscitate Alberto).

But the true spectacle that Almodóvar creates in this film is not one that pertains to plot twists or to spectacular dramaturgical leaps, it is instead one of an alchemical character construction – under his direction, Banderas performs Salvador using microscopic gestures, with an aura of grace which never permits him to slip into caricature, while still offering the audience more than enough instances of humor, so as to not permit them to be overwhelmed by the same protracted agony that he is suffering, himself.

Fragile and corseted within his movements, yet still surprisingly charming, Salvador is the true spectacle of the film, and his search for an escape from his pain onto glory takes a trip through painkillers, heroin, medical check-ups and x-rays, offering moments which successively leads the spectator though melodrama, comedy, even a passing hint of a thriller, all played out less intensely than in Almodóvar’s other films, yet precisely calibrated as to not slip into kitch, while still more than enough to create an autobiographical opus that is true to its author both in subject matter and in style.

It’s also a film capable of standing on its own feet (while, within the larger oeuvre of Almodóvar, it may be set as a part of a triptych along with La Ley del deseo and La mala educación), which is so overwhelmingly sensuous and touching that is reconfirms Almodóvar’s status as a director fully within the parameters of glory, in spite of the failure of Julieta, his previous feature.

Oana Ghera