Almodóvar’s Deep Dive Into … Almodóvar

Bitter Christmas is Pedro Almodóvar ’s 24th feature film over the course of 46 years. There’s never been more than a three-year gap between his releases. He won Cannes’ best director prize in the 1990s ( All About My Mother ), an Oscar for best screenplay in the 2000s ( Talk to Her ) and the Venice Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, just two years ago ( The Room Next Door ). With his latest movie, Bitter Christmas , the 76-year-old Spaniard remains on that restless trajectory, pushing himself deeper into uncharted territory — this time, by turning the camera back on himself. Related Stories Movies Sorry, Caleb Hearon Is Not Your Clown in 'Trash Mountain' Grief Dramedy Movies Courteney Cox Says She Decided to Direct 'Evil Genius' After Chance Encounter at the Beverly Hills Hotel: "I Made a Lot of Deals There"

In fact, he does this within several sections of his cinematic nesting doll of a drama. The main plot follows Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a highly regarded filmmaker in the present day — and resembling Almodóvar in more ways than the spiked silver hair — writing a screenplay inspired by a period of his life from two decades earlier. Bitter Christmas shifts between Raúl’s day-to-day, centered on his real-life bonds with assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) and boyfriend Santi (Quim Gutiérrez) seeping into his fiction, and the evolving action of Raúl’s movie (also called Bitter Christmas — yes, we’re getting very meta here). That latter arc follows a director named Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) who begins suffering panic attacks while feeling out her relationship with her new boyfriend, a kindly stripper and firefighter named Bonifacio (Patrick Criado).

Raúl ruminates over how much to pull from reality in telling Elsa’s story. At one point, he is confronted by a loved one about inserting a vulnerable, private moment from their life for his own script’s ending. He considers the overlap between Santi and Bonifacio. It can feel like you’re watching some sort of Almodóvar documentary — but of course, the director himself is the third layer. Raúl, too, is told through his lens.

This made for an emotional process for Almodóvar, a master of melodrama who’s gone richly personal with modern classics like Bad Education and Pain and Glory . “This is a film in which I really expose myself a lot,” he says. “I have always been attracted to the very mysterious relationship between reality and creation. I didn’t want to pull back in being critical of myself and my own creative process.”

Fans of Almodóvar can read into Bitter Christmas as much as they’d like — the lines between fact and fiction are blurry and ambiguous, and in conversation, Almodóvar shares key autobiographical reference points without diving into the specifics.

Yet the introspection remains fascinating, especially for a director who’s never been afraid of big feelings rooted in aching truth. The dynamic between the ailing, short-tempered Elsa and the sweet, hunky Bonifacio is drawn directly from Almodóvar’s own relationship with a boyfriend from the early 2000s.