Review: 'Bitter Christmas' shows Pedro Almodvar in a self-reflexive mood twice over

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Set us as preferred The frailty of the human body has been front of mind for Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar in his recent movies.His Oscar-nominated “Pain and Glory” featured an aging filmmaker fighting chronic back spasms.

The English-language drama “The Room Next Door” concerned Tilda Swinton’s war reporter staring down terminal cancer.His characters’ anxieties about illness and mortality reflect his own, and Almodóvar’s latest is similarly interested in notions of legacy and decline.But although “Bitter Christmas” deals with myriad ailments, it finds the 77-year-old auteur in a slightly more playful mode.

Exploring how art can help mediate the inevitable sorrows that visit every life, Almodóvar provocatively layers one fiction on top of another.Bárbara Lennie plays Elsa, a former filmmaker in Madrid in 2004.Her two features failed to wow audiences, prompting her to pivot to a lucrative, if unfulfilling, career directing commercials.

That’s how she met her younger boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), a sweet firefighter and occasional stripper whose club she checked out in the hopes of casting a hunky stud.As “Bitter Christmas” begins, however, Elsa is sidelined by a debilitating migraine.

Plus, she’s battling panic attacks, a physiological symptom of the fact that she never properly mourned her mother, who died a year earlier.Elsa is so busy she barely notices that her body and spirit are fast deteriorating.

Awards At 76, the Spanish auteur arrives in Cannes with an autofictional new film, ‘Bitter Christmas,’ and the luxury of speaking his mind.Our columnist talks with Almodóvar, uncensored.But before we can delve into Elsa’s woes, Almodóvar reveals a twist: She is merely a figment of the imagination of Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a successful older filmmaker in 2026 who ...