"Dolor y gloria": review

I've finally popped a particular cherry: I have now seen my very first Pedro Almodóvar film. In my case, that film was 2019's "Dolor y gloria," known in English as "Pain and Glory."* The film stars Almodóvar regular Antonio Banderas in a role that is the diametrical opposite of typecasting: Banderas normally plays suave heroes and slinky lovers, but in this film, he plays Salvador Mallo, a writer-director who suffers a whole constellation of bodily and psychic maladies—a man who has had back surgery that has left him stiff and shambling but has done nothing to reduce his agony.

An opening narration lets us into Mallo's inner life: largely unschooled because of his talent for singing (the priests at his school removed the young Mallo from regular classes in order to train him exclusively in the vocal arts), Salvador has gotten his education simply by living the life he has lived: his eventual fame as an artist taught him geography, history, and culture because he was obliged to fly all over the world; he learned anatomy and physiology as he began to suffer an increasing number of physical ailments; he learned psychology when depression became a constant companion. This is the dolor that afflicts Salvador's existence: these days, he works on no projects, is graying and effectively crippled; he merely marks time until his eventual death.

The film treats us to flashbacks of Salvador's past. We learn his parents (Raúl Arévalo and Penelope Cruz—another Almodóvar regular) were poor and often on the move before his family finally settled—somewhat—in the small village of Paterna, where Salvador and his family lived in a cave-like underground residence. Salvador, despite being so young, learned enough of the Three Rs on his own to be able to tutor a local twenty-something handyman, Eduardo (César Vicente), who was illiterate. As a boy, Salvador knew he didn't want to enter the priesthood, and he also began to deal with his latent, incipient homosexuality. In the present day, a much older Salvador Mallo learns that one of his older films, "Sabor" ("Taste"), has been remastered and is being shown in Madrid. Mallo had had a falling-out with the film's lead actor, Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), because of Alberto's hot temper and heroin addiction. But the film's restorers want both Mallo and Crespo to present the film and do a Q&A session afterward, so Mallo goes in search of Crespo. Much of the plot is devoted to the men's reunion, reconciliation, and return to creative form: Crespo visits Mallo's home and discovers, on Salvador's computer, an autobiographical text, confessional in nature, that Crespo immediately wants to perform on stage as a one-man show—an extended monologue. Mallo is hesitant; the piece is very personal and deals with a dark period in Mallo's life when he had separated from a male lover.

A lot more happens in this film; there are several parallel plots, plus a highly entertaining twist at the very end of the story. As I watched "Dolor y gloria," I was reminded of how Europeans often go about their filmmaking. This wasn't about car chases and explosions; there were no martial-arts battles or aliens in sleek capital ships haring off to exotic planets. This was simply an exploration of one man's life during an important period in his existence. Salvador experiments with heroin when he meets Alberto; the drug, at least initially, helps with the constant pain. Salvador remembers his mother as both a young and an old woman, in the prime of her life and at the end. By sheer coincidence, he reunites with his old lover Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who is the subject of the confessional monologue performed by Alberto. These are nothing but moments in a life; it's up to the viewer to explore them, chew them over, and try to understand whether they add up to anything. There is no exploding Death Star to mark a dramatic moment, no sword driven through an enemy's sternum. Instead, what we see is merely human: the possible return of a spark of creativity—of life—to a broken man. A tiny bit of gloria to shine through the clouds of dolor.

"Dolor y gloria" is meditative, thoughtful, meandering. Even though the city of Madrid is the backdrop for much of the plot, we don't actually see much of Madrid: most of the action and dialogue take place in interior spaces like Salvador's relatively lavish apartment, festooned with evocative paintings, which Alberto describes as looking like a museum. It was hard for me to process Antonio Banderas in the role of a crippled man; Banderas is ferociously athletic, being no stranger to English-language action films like "The Mask of Zorro" and "The Expendables 3." But Banderas has the chops to pull off the role convincingly; it's a fine performance, and the other stars also do wonderful work.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of watching this film, my introduction to Almodóvar's oeuvre, was the rekindling of an interest in European film in general. I don't know whether I'll be actively seeking Eurofilms out, but I won't say no to them if they suddenly appear as recommendations on iTunes or Amazon Prime Video. (I'm eager to watch "Portrait de la jeune fille en feu," a.k.a. "Portrait of a Lady on Fire.")

I've heard enough about Pedro Almodóvar to know that many of his films deal with mother-son issues, family, youth versus age, and human relationships in all their weird and wonderful permutations. "Dolor y gloria," his most recent film, was a great introduction to his world for a neophyte like me. Beautifully filmed, carefully paced, and never insulting to its audience, this movie is an expert exploration of the pain and glory of one man's life.

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*In case you're wondering about the seemingly inconsistent capitalization, I can tell you that Spanish follows many of the same capitalization conventions as French. What I mean is that, for most titles, you capitalize the first letter of the title but leave the rest of the words alone as long as they're common nouns. The title of Mircea Eliade's seminal work Treatise on the History of Religions, for example, is written Traité d'histoire des religions in French, the French way. By the same token, "Dolor y gloria" is written just as it should be—no big "G."