“I always heard you say that the ending imposes itself on the development of a story. And that the author has to accept it even if it isn’t the ending that she’d foreseen.”
Writing something means you give it a full life. It breathes in front of you to the point where you can see it getting up on its legs and becoming so real that you may forget that you are the one clicking away on your laptop. A story of one woman on the verge is at the center of Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas, a melodrama about whether a writer is pulling the strings for his own benefit and forgetting the story he should be telling. Never before has the price of creation felt so costly.
There are two timelines running alongside each other in Almodóvar’s latest. We first meet Elsa, an advertising director, in 2004, as she suffers from a mind-numbing migraine before she is whisked off to the emergency room by her hunky beau, Bonifacio, to see what, if anything, can help her. It turns out that Elsa is a creation of Leonardo Sbaraglia’s Raúl, a screenwriter and filmmaker who is using Elsa as a stand-in for himself for his next feature, Bitter Christmas. We immediately wonder how much Almodóvar is referencing himself throughout this drama since his filmography is bursting at the seams when it comes to exploring creativity and the adoration of women. Elsa’s friend, Natalia, is dealing with the overwhelming grief since the loss of her son, while Patricia confesses that she strongly suspects that her husband is having an affair. Elsa, herself, is still battling the loss of her own mother.
All of this, of course, is Raúl’s creation as he tries to light the spark for a new idea that he feels passionate enough about. Bonifacio, we presume, is a stand-in for his partner, Santi, and we soon learn that some of the emotional entanglements come from the real-life moments between Raúl and his devoted producing partner, Mónica, who is about to leave on sabbatical to be with her friend, Elena, as she goes through a personal crisis. Because we cannot forget how autobiographical some of Almodóvar’s can be, our mind begins to percolate how much he is looking inward with this new film.
Bitter Christmas helps us understand how a writer must grapple with that whiteness of the page. Do we reach for things we don’t even know we are reaching for out of desperation, or are we truly inspired to write? What do we take from real life and can we negotiate with ourselves that we can separate that reality from fiction? How can real life serve as inspiration without deepening an already fragile wound? Can real life events, especially those we take without permission, be seen as a sacrifice to the holy altar of art?
There are big questions swirling all throughout Bitter Christmas, and to spoil any of the drama would do a disservice to the parallel plotlines that Almodóvar has crafted. I will say, though, that the final fifteen minutes are absolutely thrilling in a way that I didn’t know the filmmaker was interesting in exploring at this stage in his life. There is a stand-off between two friends at an outdoor cafe that is so divine, so dramatic, so fraught that the words literally ignite the streetlamps as the tension mounts. It is one of Almodóvar’s most thrilling finales that I have seen in a long time.
“I’m just a writer who’s getting old, like you said,” Raúl says. “What can I do?” If this is Almodóvar speaking directly to us, we know what advice to offer: don’t ever stop.
Bitter Christmas opens in New York and Los Angeles on November 13 before expanding nationwide on November 25.
