A not so subtle thread connects mirrors and tears. Both, if we pay attention to the baroque obsession with both, speak of fragility, of the ephemeral nature of the world and the intimate. Through the mirror, we know that matters like youth, beauty, and even optimism last only for a short while, barely the instant of a reflection. And tears, on the other hand, warn us of how vulnerable the body is, and ultimately everything else. Both speak of time, of passing time, and of time frozen in a moment of deep and uncontrollable emotion. And both are the basic tools (like guns and girls as the great misogynistic visionary used to say) of a genre like melodrama in particular and of cinema without further specifications in general.
In Bitter Christmas there are mirrors, many, very deep and very dark, but, above all, there are tears. And between one and the other, Almodóvar creates his most challenging, most broken, most imperfect film even (if perfection still matters to anyone), most raw, most ridiculous when he gets into firefighting matters, more complex and, we have arrived, better. If we define a masterpiece by the brilliant exposition and assumption of a canon, Bitter Christmas is exactly the opposite; that is, it is an anti-masterpiece or a unmastered work. But if we accept a masterpiece as a synonym for risk, freedom, and as another way to refer to the new, then Bitter Christmas is, it is uncomfortable, it is broken, it is excessive, and it is because of Bárbara Lennie and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón (or vice versa), two extraordinary actresses, extraordinary when they cry and extraordinary when they get angry, extraordinary when one looks at the other. Extraordinary in front of mirrors and behind tears.
It could be said that the 24th film by Pedro Almodóvar is itself a mirror. After all, its plot is nothing more than that of a film director (Leonardo Sbaraglia) who creates a story in which a film director (Bárbara Lennie) can barely create anything more than notes of her own creative failure. If the previous sentence is read again, there are no guarantees that it will be better understood, but it will be seen that the word creation appears in different forms as a noun, as an adjective, and as a transitive verb. Creating, indeed, is how mirrors speak or, as someone would say, copulate. And indeed, that's what it's about, copulating fictions, as strange and raucous as it sounds, living in the gaze of others, living by copulating. It is not the first time that Almodóvar places directors at the forefront of his films in that act of narcissism (Narcissus is the man who died for his reflection, let's remember) that is not so much about oneself as about the same self, about cinema as a creator of shadow, dream, identity, and fear. This happened in the early Law of Desire, in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! there was also a director (this one from B-movies), in Kika in its television mode, in The Flower of My Secret transformed into a writer, in Bad Education, in Broken Embraces (how commendable this film seems right now), in Pain and Glory... Hurrying up, in one way or another, in all without exception.
Now, two steps further, two more directors appear, and if we consider the proximity to the author of what is narrated, it could be said that there are even three film directors counting Almodóvar himself, the real one, the one who appears in interviews talking about politics to the enthusiasm of some and the despair of others. The film progresses between the fiction imagined by Sbaraglia's character and the one suffered, as an imagined character, by Lennie's. Between one level and another, in a game of, once again, tears and mirrors, enormous dramas and firefighter strippers (Patrick Criado), Bitter Christmas twists around itself while it entangles itself and we, the viewers, get entangled in dilemmas of the disproportionate: What rights do we have over the lives of others? What are we willing to give up, if we are willing to give up anything, to fulfill our desires? What are we without the gaze of others turned, indeed, into a mirror? Can we use the lives of others to save ourselves? And so on.
With a mechanism reminiscent of Rapture by Iván Zulueta (another masterpiece of directors trapped in their own mirror) with its pulsating red frame as a frame, the film is created and uncreated in front of the viewer's eyes with a strange clarity somewhat alienated and amusingly confusing. When the director decides to erase everything created up to a certain point and start over, where does what was seen up to that moment stand? After all, with that gesture of destruction, a good part of the film is definitively refuted. Like Vertigo by Hitchcock, suddenly and right at the end, Bitter Christmas starts anew. Like Bergman's last and most poignant works, there comes a moment when it seems impossible to separate fiction and reality, fabrication and life itself. One is reflected in the other's mirror, and both, very close to the sublime, cry for their helplessness, their sadness, each of their inevitably irreparable mistakes.
At one point, Lennie's character and her friend played by Victoria Luengo listen to La Llorona by the omnipresent and now voiceless Chavela Vargas. And they cry. They do so while both watch television and look at each other. The close-up suddenly takes on the touch of myth. Never before in Almodóvar's filmography and only before in the aforementioned Bergman's, has the face become so fully and transparently the landscape of an entire life. The film moves freely between digressions, notes of a script that fails to take shape, perhaps childish arguments, and also unfathomable tragedies. And so on until in a final act it breaks, it shatters, it even shatters us. Hand in hand with a scorned and furious Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, suddenly, Bitter Christmas acquires the hardness of mirrors in the light weight of the deepest tears. So fragile. So eternal. So much.
Director: Pedro Almodóvar. Cast: Bárbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Victoria Luengo, Milena Smit. Duration: 111 minutes. Nationality: Spain.