‘Bitter Christmas’ Review: Pedro Almodóvar’s Playful New Film Nests Stories Within Stories, and Alter Egos Within Alter Egos

Early in Pedro Almodóvar’s new film “Bitter Christmas,” a female filmmaker is briefly hospitalized, and the attending physician recognizes her as the director of an offbeat film from some years before. “I hear it became a cult film,” says the good doctor. “What does that mean? Cult? Evangelical?” It’s a good question. The films of Almodóvar long ago became too broadly popular and acclaimed to merit the “cult” label, but if any filmmaker could be called the cult leader of their own cinema, it might be him: His work is so wrapped up in his own highly singular imagination, personality and, lately, even specific first-hand experience, you could accuse it of self-reverence if not for a healthy sense of humor and irony.

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An elaborately nested reflection on creative license, story ownership and art imitating life imitating art, “Bitter Christmas” is so exhaustively Almodóvarian, the viewer occasionally has to fight their way into its circular hall of mirrors. For those who do, there’s much fun to be had here: in its ripe and lively performances, in its characteristically splashy paintbox visual design, and in its twin-tracked, heavily metatextual narrative of artists following their bliss, sometimes to toxic effect.

That said, “Bitter Christmas” is Almodóvar’s second film in seven years, following 2019’s celebrated “Pain and Glory,” to indulge in self-portraiture while pursuing themes of creative inspiration and decline, the persistence (and appropriation) of memory, and the body keeping the score. And so a law of diminishing returns applies to this lighter and more elusive film, for all its bright, ephemeral pleasures.

The only non-world premiere in this year’s Cannes competition — an exception granted only to Almodóvar these days, as it has been with titles including “Volver,” “Julieta” and “Pain and Glory” — “Bitter Christmas” opened theatrically in Spain in late March, grossing a respectable $3 million domestically to date. That’s more than the director’s recent titles “The Room Next Door” and “Parallel Mothers” managed, if well short of “Pain and Glory’s” grosses. Internationally, while Almodóvar’s name always guarantees widespread arthouse exposure (with Sony Classics, as usual, releasing Stateside), the new film’s pretty insular concerns and lack of Banderas- or Cruz-level star power may curb its prospects.

For Spanish cinema buffs, however, the chief draw here is an overdue collaboration between Almodóvar and the formidable Bárbara Lennie (“Magical Girl,” “Everybody Knows,” “Sunday’s Illness”), who had a minor role in 2011’s “The Skin I Live In,” but otherwise hasn’t crossed filmographies with the director. Here, she plays the first and less direct of his two alter-ego characters in the film: Elsa, a failed arthouse filmmaker turned successful advertising director, who’s plagued by debilitating migraines but at least has steadfast support from her boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), an extremely hot and sensitive firefighter who also just happens to moonlight as a stripper. If this doesn’t sound remotely like a real person, just wait for the other shoe to drop.

Though she makes a very good living with her sellout career turn, Elsa is moved to start writing a screenplay again — feeding off the various misfortunes endured by her friends Patricia (Vicky Luengo), who’s gradually finding her way out of a bad marriage, and recently bereaved young mother Natalia (Milena Smit). And if these characters and their connections are all somewhat hazily defined — dare one say a bit first-drafty — that’s precisely the point.

For Elsa’s entire story, somewhat randomly set in the year 2004, in fact turns out to be the unfinished script being written by Raúl Rossetti (Argentine star Leonardo Sbaraglia), an esteemed auteur with Almodóvar’s distinct bearing and lavish, silvery hairdo, who has creatively been running on fumes for a while. At a loose end with his latest project, he resorts to autofiction, plundering story strands without permission from the lives of his long-suffering friend and assistant Monica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijon) and his sturdily supportive (and again, extremely hot) boyfriend Santi (Quim Gutiérrez, always welcome but underused here).

Recalibrating the stakes and credibility of the story we thought we were following, it’s a nifty, jolting reveal, though it comes at some cost to the film’s momentum. Despite Lennie’s brisk, assertive performance, Elsa’s story isn’t terribly compelling once we know it’s a mere device — though her impulsive writerly escape to the stark, black basalt beaches of Lanzarote, all the better to showcase the predominantly eye-popping palette of the film’s mise-en-scène, does gift the film with its most indelible images. Hot pink has never burned hotter; canary yellow has never sung so readily.

Raúl’s tale, meanwhile, is stifled by design: For years he’s been so self-involved, so immersed on the worlds he writes, that nothing of consequence has happened to him in the world he lives in. A rawly furious set-to with Monica in which she points out just that finally gives “Bitter Christmas” (Elsa’s story takes place in December, prompting the film’s otherwise off-beam title) some real-world dramatic fire, though just as the film appears to enter a new, freshly invigorated creative phase, it comes to a rather abrupt conclusion.

For Almodóvar acolytes, these deliberately mannered curiosities of construction are in themselves compelling, as a blunt strain of self-critique: At its best, “Bitter Christmas” is like a garishly colored costume-jewelry crystal, made to be held up to the light, so one can peer at its many reflective surfaces for glimmers of the director’s past work and regular fixations. It also functions as such because so many of the usual hallmarks and collaborative pleasures of his filmmaking are present, correct and running smoothly, from Alberto Iglesias’ fiendishly busy orchestral score to the gorgeous magazine-shoot unreality of the production and costume design, to the requisite cameo from Rossy de Palma. Without any of these things, it just wouldn’t be Almodóvar; indeed, in its slyest, most self-aware moments, this richly branded auteur bauble invites to ask if it would be anything at all.