Pain And Glory (2019) - Movie Review

In an effort to keep my writing from getting too stale, which during this time of year is especially on my mind, I try and look at different films through different lenses. Sometimes, it’s as a fan of the film’s pre-existing franchise; sometimes, it’s by latching onto a single detail in the production that I feel explains everything else around it; and sometimes, it’s just me working through my own lack of interest and squeezing my brain for anything to write about. But more than anything else, the main thing I go into every single film I review on here, and hell, pretty much every film I’ve ever watched, is through the perspective of therapy. A form of art that has the potential to help me, and other audiences, deal with some kind of personal shit. Enter this film, where that perspective comes screaming into the forefront.

On the surface, this reads like the kind of film every filmmaker out there wants to make at some point in their life: A film about a filmmaker. In this instance, it’s the fictional Salvador Mallo, played with a very welcome return to form by Antonio Banderas, who finds himself in the midst of a creative drought. While audiences are being given the chance to re-experience one of his older films remastered in cinemas, he struggles to think of anything new to create. Films like this usually have the lead film creative as a surrogate for the head honcho behind the camera, and while that is most likely the case, my lack of experience with writer/director Pedro Almodóvar’s body of work will keep me from making any direct comparisons between the character and the inspiration.

Not that I need to dig too far into that ground to see what makes this particular story resonate, as this is a quite refreshing depiction of a creative in crisis. In-between the flashbacks to his childhood in Paterna, with his mother Jacinta played by Penélope Cruz, the dabbling with his newfound heroin addiction, and his various medical issues, the film is basically framed around Salvador’s interactions with three key people: His mother Jacinta, his former lover Federico, and his former lead actor Alberto.

 

Through each person’s relationship with Salvador, wee see them affected in some way by his art. Jacinta wanted to nurture his learning as a child, and he wound up getting a choir scholarship that let him pass all his classes without taking any tests. Given how much he seems to have learnt about himself and his surroundings through his medical history and his approach to art (more on that in a bit, trust me), that seemed to have worked out just fine for him.

With Alberto, the two hadn’t spoken for decades prior to the events in-film because of Alberto’s own drug problems, but after discovering one of Salvador’s unused pieces of writing, he and the audience in turn learn more about what made Salvador the rather sad man he is.

Said piece of writing is all about his relationship with Federico, which brings him into the narrative, and the scenes between Banderas and Leonardo Sbaraglia as Federico are incredibly tender. It gives an interesting twist on how Salvador’s medical issues manifest, almost as if it’s a physical manifestation of what his own suppression of part of his sexuality is doing to him. Seeing Alberto’s performance of Addiction, the piece of writing itself, definitely adds to how heart-wrenching this aspect of the film is.

All three of them highlight a specific aspect about Salvador’s character; namely, his true addiction: Cinema. Far as I can tell, heroin is used as a stand-in for what we use to placate that addiction, when Salvador feels that he is unable to create it anymore. Whether it’s his need to consume the cinema of others, or just tell stories with the art form himself, there is something innate in him that pushes him to do it. And between how his relationship with Alberto shaped his film, how Federico shaped his writing, and how Jacinta shaped his formative years, it highlights how a lot of that storytelling is formed from Salvador’s life experiences.

There might be something to be said about how much coincidence plays into the narrative, with characters and important items encountering each other seemingly at random, but… I dunno, kind of feels accurate to my own encounters with art, cinema in particular. There have been quite a few times where I end up watching and writing about a film that makes me read something in it that reflects my life at that moment. Not because of any ingenious scheduling on my part; just random bloody chance, apparently. It’s the reason why my review for Daniel Isn’t Real turned out the way it did. That kind of revelation seems to pop up when it’s most needed, and it helps highlight the genuinely therapeutic power of art.

Art has the uncanny ability to reflect the real world in a way that straight-up truth is unable to. The phrase ‘artistic license’ is commonly used to explain when art based on reality isn’t entirely true to life, but in that process, art is able to reveal a more personal, subjective truth. Truths about one’s personality, one’s interests, one’s sexuality, or even one’s purpose in life. And through Salvador’s arc to regain his creative fire, we see how art helped him understand himself, and how his art in turn helped those around him better understand him along with themselves. And by film’s end, it’s through art that he comes to terms with who he is, what he’s done, and what he must do next.

It’s basically everything I believe in when it comes to what cinema is capable of, crystallised in a fashion that I could never replicate, even with another five years of scratching at its surface with these reviews. It’s quite revelatory, and it makes for one of the single best arguments for cinema therapy I’ve ever encountered. And bear in mind that this is my perspective without bringing the director’s past work and experiences into it; if you’re at all familiar with that, I’m willing to bet you’ll be into this film even more than I am.