Bitter Christmas: A Bah Humbug to Moviemaking

Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas explores his own recent creative crisis. Using a prismatic structure, Almodóvar tells three stories that reflect one another with diminishing returns. These interwoven tales never blend due to the blockage suffered by gay male Spanish filmmaker Raul (Leonardo Sbaraglia, styled with a storm of gray-white hair to resemble Almodóvar himself). Viewers must do a meta reading about the nature and purpose of filmmaking and artistic expression.

Almodóvar makes the mistake of introducing Raul’s imaginary stories before revealing their real-life source. As Bitter Christmas becomes more and more convoluted and uninvolving, it undeniably reflects a peculiar Millennial crisis: the internalized post-Covid repression that has paralyzed many filmmakers. Once the most exciting filmmaker of the late 1980s, Almodóvar now suffers the same malaise that has also befallen comparable colleagues Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. You don’t have to be a cinephile to realize that most contemporary filmmakers are bereft of fresh ideas and genuine inspiration.

Before getting to that core Raul/Almodóvar narrative, Bitter Christmas first presents stories in which a female filmmaker Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) imagines the drama of a woman, Patrizia (Victoria Luengo), who feels her same maladies and longs to escape an unhappy marriage, and then another woman, Natalia (Milena Smit), who is deep in mourning. This narrative contraption is the worst example of a gay male’s feminine empathy that Almodóvar has ever contrived. Unlike Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, this film lacks the camp buoyancy that made Almodóvar a comic hybrid of Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel, putting him at the vanguard of the world’s evolving sexual sophistication.

Now foregrounding his identification with female experience, Almodóvar seems to cater to political correctness rather than flout it. That a once-major pop artist can no longer make irresistible movies but instead succumbs to patronizing political trends is a cause for alarm more significant than any particular misbegotten film.

In one subplot, Raul is told, “You can lie in your life but not in your fiction,” referring to how he mistreats his partner Santi (Quim Gutiérrez) while also exploiting his assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) as fodder for his newest script.

This contorted set-up suggests that Almodóvar feels pressure to join the global progressivism that a former bad boy of the Spanish underground is now obliged to endorse. That’s why the ultra-bourgeois Bitter Christmas lacks comedy and eroticism. Raul’s sex life is transferred to the shallow, quasi-porn of Elsa’s relationship with boytoy Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), a firefighter and part-time stripper (probably an homage to the superior João Pedro Rodrigues satire Will-O’-the-Wisp.

Almodóvar has lost audacity. Sadness pervades the movie. Its title comes from “Amarga Navidad” (“Bitter Christmas”), a ranchera (folk torch song) performed by Chavela Vargas. But this is the least impassioned film Almodóvar has made; its emotions are distanced by artifice — in imagination, storytelling, and performance. The projection of Raul/Almodóvar’s true feelings into fakery distances real life so much that the melodrama is drab. It’s not fabulous or funny (despite ornamental design and another urgent Alberto Iglesias score), but arid like Lanzarote, the black-sand volcanic island where make-believe characters Elsa and Victoria retreat into a dull version of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona — another go at Almodóvar’s insipid The Room Next Door. None of these meta-antics result in moral summation like Fellini’s masterpieces La Dolce Vita and Otto e mezzo.

Although Almodóvar avoids obvious political pronouncement like those that ruined Killers of the Flower Moon, West Side Story, and Disclosure Day, the twisted autobiographical aspects of Bitter Christmas still indicate that he suffers a similar personal liberal panic. (Unlike Spielberg and Scorsese, Almodóvar has made foolish partisan comments on American politics.) Almodóvar can’t escape the private anxiety that Scorsese and Spielberg experience along with the rest of us. Almodóvar’s inability to disentangle primal emotional need from political confusion is evident on screen in Bitter Christmas and ultimately unsatisfying.