Wounds Of Desire In Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain And Glory

Were you looking for such a thing, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more humanizing film than Pedro Almodóvar’s latest little miracle. The Spanish director/writer’s Pain and Glory is a story about an artist, who suffers, and remembers, and relives. This tale is only somewhat the story of people in general, though it’s easy and quite wrenching to project ourselves onto the life of Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), a veteran film director afflicted by several physical maladies. His bodily decline brings him great pain, physical and mental. Of course he can’t work, can’t create, in this deteriorating state. He spends his days mostly prostrate in bed, having gobbled a vast regimen of pills and yogurts, and just recently has dabbled in heroin.

Mallo’s dope daze propels him into recollections of his past, his childhood in the ’60s, when he emigrated with his parents to a village in Valencia (where the family lived in a cave — a painted one with skylights, but still, a cave), his overwhelming first sexual desire, his first adult love in the Madrid of the ’80s and the still festering pain of the demise of that intense love; he recalls his early discovery of cinema, when films were projected on a whitewashed wall, in the open air — the cinema of Salvador’s childhood smells like pee (the children urinated behind that wall), jasmine and summer breeze. And Salvador contemplates his current thudding dull stare into nothingness, a drab place that denies him the will or the physical ability to make films.