Two of the masters competing for Palme D’Or this year have taken tangential paths in cinema. If Ken Loach does a trenchant take down of the new economy in Britain, Spanish auteur Pedro Almodvar has gone on an intensely personal journey into filmmaking itself. Pain and Glory, in which Antonia Banderas plays filmmaker Salvador Mallo, cast in Almodovar’s own mould, is steeped in nostalgia and whimsy, often bordering on the indulgent. It may leave the viewer in a daze and disarray in the immediate aftermath but the essential dissipation matures well over time.
Pain and Glory unfolds like part reality and part dream, pirouetting on a series of vivid vignettes and lingering memories – of Mallo’s childhood, of his mother, the lover Federico and of cinema itself.
The cave like the home he lives in, as a child, is like a “catacomb of creativity”. As Mallo puts it, the cinema of his childhood is something that he associates with the white walls of his womb-like home and with water, its liquidity paralleling, perhaps, the fluid flow of images. The cinema of his childhood smells of piss; and jasmine and summer breeze too. Cinema is his religion. Right from childhood he wants to take to filmmaking than go to the seminary to become a priest.
However, the most dichotomous and conflicted of all of Mallo’s relationships is with cinema itself. It is about both the pain and glory of filmmaking. What are you doing not making films, he is asked, about his creative crisis. Living, he replies. The passion that takes him away from life, a calling from which he wants to run away, ironically, also brings a wholeness to his life. But then the medium that connects him to the world is also the one that isolates him, brings him an intense loneliness. Cinema is an addiction that feeds another – drugs. Yet cinema, that takes him to the verge of destruction, is also his only saviour and redemption.
The fractious relationship with his actor, the concern whether his film has aged well or not and his mother’s assertion that she doesn’t like “auto-fiction”, seemed to moments picked up from life.
In the press conference after the film’s screening, Almodovar said that although biographical, the film should not be taken literally, it’s not as though everything shown on screen happened to him as well. Some incidents – like the broken love affair – he also went through but most have been fictionalised. For him, in telling a story close to him, it was the lives of others that he had to be careful about.
Banderas, who came to act after a brush with a “heart problem”, said that the film was all about “finding himself back… to become a new Antonio Banderas”. He also called it a “journey of humility” – coming to the sets without the baggage of who he was, about starting from the scratch. “It was the happiest month of my life that no one can take away.” For him the film is about the “so-called spaces left open in our lives that we need to close when it comes to our families, friends or even cinema”.
Almodovar looks back at his films as those he always wanted to make. “The mistakes are also mine and I acknowledge them. I have been the master of my own career,” he said. Currently working on two film adaptations he is far from the tortured state his protagonist seems to be in: “I do not want to lose the passion for cinematic adventure.”
As an aside, for trivia's sake, the film has an entire sequence with pictures of Shirdi Sai Baba, Krishna, Guru Nanak in the background hinting at the spiritual leaning of the character in the foreground and obliquely bringing India into the Palme D'Or race.
