Almodóvar Looks Back With Regret, And Conviction, In The Elegiac 'Pain And Glory'

Late in Pedro Almodóvar's wonderful new drama, Pain and Glory, there comes a tough and tender flashback in which a filmmaker hears from his elderly mother (Julieta Serrano) that the neighbors don't like being portrayed in his movies. "I don't like auto-fiction," she adds with a note of acid reproof we rarely hear from the devoted maters, blood and surrogate, who people Almodóvar's movies.

Forgive the director, on- and off-screen, his evasive grin. Every Almodóvar film, which completes (1987), which launched Banderas' career, and (2004) in a trilogy centering on filmmakers navigating passion and loss, Almodóvar recreates his own history from his childhood in rural Spain in the sixties through his first real love affair amid the sexual freedom of post-Franco Spain. The film is an elegiac fiction from the viewpoint of a director in early old age, but it cuts so close to the bone of Almodóvar's own aging that he used furnishings and clothing from his own Madrid apartment, transformed into a place of primary-colored artistic delights that its owner is too bummed to enjoy.