BITTER CHRISTMAS is about an aging director who’s having trouble finding an original idea, keeps cannibalising his old work, can’t let go of the death of his mother, and it turns out the movie you’ve just watched is the movie he’s been writing. We’ve seen it all before, though with a less self-referential acknowledgement much less inquiry. The complex structure veering from fiction to non-fiction is what he used in BAD EDUCATION and PAIN AND GLORY; the narrative ease with which he moves through time and media is still a wonder; women searching in the night for drugs that will alleviate their pain we’ve seen in WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS, WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, and even THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET. We’ve seen the black Fomentera beach in BROKEN EMBRACES; the artistic pottery and works of art as backdrop in all of his movies. He’s upscaled to cleaner lines and fancier kitchens but you can still get interior decorating tips from Almodóvar movies, though now you need a much bigger budget. Even sonically the film repeats themes you’ve heard before in his older movies. Chavela returns from the grave to make the characters and us cry again, more layer but not too different a deployment than Caetano Veloso in TALK TO HER. Handsome men swimming, cars driving on darkened Christmas streets like in LIVE FLESH; cars coloured Valentino red like in almost all his movies; even all the bit part players that have featured in his films since the 80s – and his brother—here pose for a group picture with Rossy de Palma. Filmmakers obsessed with films about filmmaking can be tiring for audiences and I do look at what seems an embourgeoisification with sadness, though I’ll grant that his recent films don’t neglect history, the social and the political and a filmmaker can’t do everything at once. This is about autofiction, mythmaking, self-iconisation, and it’s best viewed through an auteurist lens. Through that lens, it can be very fascinating. Watching it, my mind kept flickering through the various associations, where you’d seen what before, and I was quite unmoved by what I was seeing, admiring the narrative facility of chucking out characters, doing impossible scenes; critical of a loss of sex and desire in the way the strip-tease scene was filmed. Unusually for an Almodóvar film, it stimulated my brain more than my emotions.
José Arroyo
