HIS REIGN IN SPAIN

Banderas and Almodovar, team up for rapturous memoir, Pain And Glory

In Pain And Glory, Antonio Banderas plays a famous Spanish director working on a new film project. "Is it a comedy or a tragedy?" someone asks him. Banderas gazes back. "I don't know," he replies, with thoughtful sincerity.

You might as well ask the same question about life, and get the same answer — at least, life as portrayed in all its tenderness, irony, disappointments, and absurdity in this wonderful new movie from Pedro Almodovar. As the filmmaker onscreen looks back on his own life and work in this semi-autobiographical story, so does Almodovar, behind the camera, examine the people and events that shaped and inspired him as a creative artist — and as a human being.

Of course, a filmmaker tells a story about a filmmaker, and you think Fellini and 81/2. But Pain and Glory is less about what sparks artistic imagination than about the ways we find to get through life, day by day. Almodovar offers very little action, but plenty of talk and lingering close-ups, resonant with feeling.

It may not look like much, plot-wise, but the experience of watching this movie unfold onscreen is rapturous.

Etxiandia and Banderas: mellowed animosity

Bandera's stars as Salvador Mallow, a Spanish filmmaker with an international reputation. His most famous movie is being honored on the 30th anniversary of its release, and Salvador is invited to speak at a special screening in Madrid, along with the film's star, Alberto Cresco (Asier Etxeandia).

When Salvador visits Alberto to discuss it, he gets a cool reception, having publicly denounced Alberto's performance back in the day, but time has mellowed their animosity (if not Salvador's opinion), and they decide to do the appearance.

But time has been less benevolent to Salvador in other ways. His body is in decline from a variety of chronic ailments (laid out for the viewer in a series of jazzy graphics of human anatomy, spinal formation, blood vessels, and neuro pathways), to the point that he's in more constant pain than his daily cocktail of painkillers can relieve.

Cruz: salt of the earth

Something he's not yet tried is Alberto's favorite painkiller — heroin — and the few moments of pain-free bliss it provides quickly adds addiction to Salvador's list of maladies.

But this isn't a movie about drugs. Salvador's heroin reveries are another excuse for flashbacks to Salvador's childhood in the countryside with the salt-of-the-earth mother he adored, Jacinta (Penelope Cruz, marvelous, as always). Stoic and subdued by pain for so long that he's been unable to work, Salvador's memories finally uncork his creative drive and he starts writing again.


When Alberto finds and performs a monologue Salvador has written about his youth, an old flame (possibly the love of his life), Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), arrives on his doorstep for a brief, bittersweet reunion. And there are some lovely scenes of the elderly Jacinta (longtime Almodovar stalwart Julieta Serrano), living in Salvador's posh flat toward the end of her life, gently confessing to her devoted son her disappointment over some of the choices he's made.

At the heart of it all is Antonio Banderas, whose best movies as a young actor were his Spanish-language collaborations with Almodovar, his mentor, before Hollywood tried to typecast him as a conventional "Latin lover." Reunited with Almodovar in the excellent The Skin I Live In in 2011, Banderas is riveting in every frame of Pain and Glory, not by doing anything showy or actorish, but in his profound and wistful quiet.

Whether he's making a sly, impish remark, or expressing in his eyes alone all that's left unsaid with his former lover or his aging mother, this movie belongs to Banderas. You can't take your eyes off him.

Comedy or tragedy? You can't possibly know from one day to the next while you're living it, Almodovar suggests. At least he has the grace — not to mention the nerve — to keep exploring the question.