LOST AND FOUND

THE ARTIST’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INSTINCT HARDLY makes for a natural fit when it comes to film. Cinema may be uniquely equipped to portray memories and dreams, but the act of portraying one’s past is so fraught with potential pitfalls—of re-creation, of imagination, of verisimilitude—that filmmakers often foreground their own processes to create a distancing effect, making works that are less novelistic than metacinematic and call attention to their construction. With auteurism a relatively new concept, Fellini plunged into his own past in 8½ (1963), establishing not only his own legend but also the very concept of the tortured artist-filmmaker. He set a psycho-structural template: many autobiographical movies that have come in its wake—Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975), Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes (1992)—owe a debt to that film’s fragmentary nature, acknowledging the mind’s inability to recall the past as a linear progression of events. Even Joanna Hogg’s superlative and shattering latest film, The Souvenir, which moves forward as a legible cause-and-effect narrative, an inexorable lurch toward its maker’s self-realization, is effectively fractured via unsettling distancing effects. The act of remembering in all these films is more than just poignant; it’s actively painful.

Pedro Almodóvar leans into the pain with his, his most autobiographical to date. Structurally, the genre is a no-brainer, perhaps, for a writer-director who has long preferred to tell stories centrifugally, spiraling out from a revelatory center rather than having finite beginnings and endings. Almodóvar’s movies of the 21st century especially, such as (2004)—with which this film shares a strong kinship— (2009), and (2011), have consistently moved away from linearity, as though coasting on the waves of memory. In , Almodóvar makes as explicit as he can that, although it’s a fictional film, much of what we see on screen is based on his own life, right down to the furnishings and paintings on the walls, many of which have been modeled on things he owns, and some of which were lifted from his apartment during shooting. In this latest film, which is a deeply moving inquiry into the catharsis of delving into one’s own past, and the salvation in coming to terms with it, Almodóvar’s drive toward autobiography goes way beyond “write what you know.” This is more like “show who you are.”