U.S. Trailer for Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas Presents a Tale of Autofiction

After premiering in Spain and then coming to Cannes Film Festival, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature Bitter Christmas will finally be coming to North America this fall. After stopping at TIFF and NYFF, Sony Pictures Classics will open the meta drama on November 13 and has released the first full trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Bitter Christmas tells two alternating stories, one starring Elsa, an advertising director, in 2004, during a long weekend in December. The second takes place in 2026 and stars Raúl, a screenwriter and director who is writing a script that we soon discover is the story of Elsa, her boyfriend Bonifacio, and her friends Patricia and Natalia. Mixed with fiction, Elsa is, in a way, Raúl’s alter ego, who, like him, resorts to autofiction as a solution to a long period of creative drought. He looks inside himself, and he can’t help but also look at the people who make up his most intimate universe: his partner and his assistant.”

Alistair Ryder said in his review, “Bitter Christmas announces that Pedro Almodóvar has entered his late era, returning once again to the metafiction well for another structurally ambitious analysis of the creative process with at least one character to whom he bears a passing resemblance. It will be nobody’s favorite Almodóvar film, but offers some simple delights because it might be the most Almodóvar film; its deconstruction of a director’s writing routine feels oddly comforting, despite attempts to confound each time it pulls the rug back to reveal a new layer in its Russian doll of character perspectives. An autofictional exploration of creation has been a recurring interest since 1995’s The Flower of My Secret, with 2019’s Pain and Glory feeling like the definitive statement in this regard, featuring his most barely concealed director surrogate to date (Antonio Banderas’ Salvador Mallo) and a direct address of the various chronic conditions which have affected his work. His latest doesn’t add a profound new perspective that justifies going back to such similar subject matter; the familiarity of this preoccupation means it becomes more of a surface pleasure than another revelatory look at how a master auteur gets inspiration.”

See the trailer below.