Antonio Banderas plays a stand-in for Pedro Almodóvar in the director’s serious-minded and moving late-career meditation on mortality, memory, regret and desireThe year’s best films in the
UK | in the USI suspect that many middle-aged men would like Antonio Banderas to play them in the movie of their life: sultry, handsome and sensitive, with those eyes like bruised fruit. Well, Pedro Almodóvar is one of the select few who can actually make this happen. While Pain and Glory isn’t exactly an autobiography, it may as well be: Banderas plays a gay Spanish film director with bushy grey hair who lives in a flat that, apparently, is a replica of Almodóvar’s own; the fact that he’s called Salvador and not Pedro is only the tiniest of fig leaves.
Salvador is an introspective individual confronting the dying of the light. He’s not exactly raging, more moaning quietly in despair. His back hurts, his headaches are getting worse and he has a mysterious choking ailment that nothing seems to fix. More significantly, he is embarking on a reckoning with his past triggered by the plans a film archive has to restore and rerelease one of his early films. (This film is called Sabor, or Flavour, and we get to see its sleazy poster image of a blood-red lipsticked mouth with a tongue reshaped as a strawberry.) Salvador has fallen out with the lead actor, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), but it’s his decision to try and reconnect, to get Alberto along for the dreaded audience Q&A, that triggers Salvador’s act of mental archaeology.