David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Review: Pain
and Glory)
Pain and Glory
“The eyes,
those silent tongues of love.” –
Cervantes
Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain
and Glory finds, through personal pain, creative glory. Notably private
despite his gossip zest, a party lion but shy of egotism, the Spanish maestro
has made his 22nd feature no vanity project. “Without filming, my
life is meaningless,” says director Salvador Mello, played by Antonio Banderas
as a slender, sick, tired and retired Almodóvar. In 1981 Pedro, at 32 the bold
and impudent Prospero of post-Franco filming, first greeted Banderas in a
Madrid café: “You should do movies. You have a very beautiful face.” Pedro was
gay, Antonio straight, yet they soon made mutual love to film (first with the
campy hoot Labyrinth of Passion).
After long separation – Banderas pursued an American career, his mentor didn’t
– their shared consummation is Pain and
Glory (Dolor y Gloria).
Start: Salvador Mello in a pool, a long surgical scar
tracing his spine. Memories bubble up, of a poor but often bucolic boyhood.
Little Salva (Asier Flores) smiles at mama Jacinta (Penélope Cruz) washing
sheets in a river. She breaks into song with other women, with flirty touches
of flamenco. The sun-soaked warmth evokes both Renoirs (painter Pierre-Auguste,
son-auteurist Jean). This movie is a river. It swerves and cascades in the
Almodóvar way, as broken currents rejoin with added life. Modern Salva,
bedeviled by an agonized back and migraines, is startled by the return of his
early macho star Alberto Crespo (virile, almost feral Asier Etxeandia). Now, 32
years after their famous creative rupture, the old boys can still ego-tango.
Alberto lusts for a comeback with the one-man show Salva has scripted from his
own life. Irritated but amused, Salva offers the script, partly because Alberto
brings pain relief with his chalky caballo: heroin (fortunately only a
sub-motif of the plot; Almodóvar has said that he never used “horse”).
Childhood again: a rustic, whitewashed cave, the home
that tireless Jacinta makes beautiful for her brilliant boy. He is a choirboy
star, although more hooked on classic movie idols like Marilyn (Pedro chose the
same stunning MM clip from Niagara
that glows in Bertolucci’s La Luna).
As mama sews his sock, using her wooden “egg” (Proust ping for me: my
grandmother’s perfectly spheroid darning egg!), Salva asks, “Do you think Liz
Taylor sews Robert Taylor’s socks?” The cave dwelling is his imagination crib,
the egg a talisman of maternal devotion. Salva will crack mom’s pious shell of
Catholicism after he sees the workman Eduardo (César Vicente) nude, washing
himself like a Hispano-Roman statue sprung to life. Eduardo’s drawing of the
lad (tender but not pedophilic) becomes another talisman, floating in the time
stream.
Grown Salva’s supreme Madrid lover, the lost Federico,
is the soul hook of the one-man show. Inevitably he returns, now frankly hetero
(and a father), played by suave and kind-eyed Leonardo Sbaraglia. Old embers
flicker through ash as they talk (photo above) in Salva’s art-filled home, his
adult cave and refuge. One of the supremely intimate, barely carnal scenes of
gay filming is compact with memories, gestures, words and silences. It’s Pedro
perfecto, a chalice of self-mythic elegy. With Federico’s brief return, and
actor Alberto having played “Marcelo” in his last Salva movie, the tap root is
clearly Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini. Almodóvar was 68½ when he
filmed this picture. An 8 ½ poster
vamps a wall. That 1963 marvel’s time-foldings of dream, memory, anxiety and
desire are even more emotionally loaded in Pain
and Glory, yet with no pedantic stuffing.
It’s riveting, without obvious rivets (the medical
anxiety scenes are a little generic). Embracing all is the Almodóvarian style
jacket of blooming colors, graphics, design and José Luis Alcaine’s almost
liquid photography. We could doodle academically, calling this a dialectic of
river (time), cave (imagination), egg (love), caballo (false care) and
friendship (true care). But as with The
Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino’s fluent vision of an aging style maestro in
Rome, consummate grace eclipses analysis. In this masculine story Sbaraglia,
Etxeandia, Vicente and young Flores are
remarkable. Their terrific eye acting, worthy of Cervantes’s quote, is topped
by Banderas’s deepest and most powerful achievement (Salva is no Zorro). Keenly
present, since any Almodóvar film must celebrate women, are Nora Navas and
Cecilia Roth as Salva’s devoted friends, and lustrous Cruz in her small but
moving role of Jacinta.
Julieta Serrano, now 86, is up to a tough job:
following Cruz as Jacinta in her lonely, ritually Catholic dotage (imagine a
shift from Sophia Loren to Betty White). After heroin and surgery and the
public “reveal” of Alberto’s one-man show, Salva returns to the yolk of the egg
and confides to Jacinta his most piercing wound: “I failed you, just by being who I am.” But Jacinta is
no homophobic fossil. After all, her loving, pious heart still beats for the
beautiful boy of the cave, who became a great Spanish artist.
SALAD (A List)
El Cine
Grande de Pedro Almodóvar
In my opinion absolutemente
his best:
Volver (2006), Pain
and Glory (2019), All About My Mother
(1999), Women on the Verge … (1988), Talk to Her (2002), Live Flesh (1997), Bad
Education (2004), Broken Embraces
(2009), Law of Desire (1987).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson
Welles began loving Spain at 18, in a 1933 visit. Biographers cannot decide if,
as claimed, he briefly became the boyish matador “El Americano.” Decades later an Andalusian producer
challenged him, saying “he doubted the legend …‘In the history of this towering
art,’ he had heard Orson boast, ‘there can be very few people who were as bad
as I was.’ But if Orson were as poor a toreador as he claimed, the man said,
surely he would have heard of him. Welles roared with laughter.” (His afición for the corrida diminished, yet his ashes would be buried in Spain at the ranch of a friend, a bullfighter. Quote from Patrick
McGilligan’s brilliant Young Orson.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
As
Marcello Rubini in La Dolce Vita
Marcello Mastroianni “extends a mood, he doesn’t posit an agenda. Ambition
flagging, religion vacant, pleasures often sterile, Rubini is chalk in a city
of bronze, brick and marble. His essential approach was indicated by Joseph
Conrad’s preface to Under Western Eyes:
‘The course of action need not be explained. It has suggested itself more as a
matter of feeling than a matter of thinking.” (Much like Banderas in Pain and Glory. Quote from the
Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita chapter of
my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in
Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie
image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.
From
left: Asier Flores, Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz, Pedro Almodóvar and Nora
Navas during the filming of Dolor y
Gloria (El Deseo, 2019; director Pedro Almodóvar, d.p. José Luis Alcaine).
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