dolor y gloria (w&d almodóvar)

Sometimes a filmmaker succeeds in occupying a role within their culture which permits them to grow old gracefully, like an artist or a novelist. There’s no need to worry about commercial viability, because there are stars who will line up to take part; the filmmkaker is free to indulge their whimsy or their genius as they see fit, without the interference of script development or production executives. Almodovar has never been near Hollywood, no matter how much his aesthetic contains elements that tally with that other culture. There’s nothing austere about his films, or overly intellectual. They possess a design elan, a delight in colour, music, artifice, which would sit happily across the Atlantic. But he’s never strayed far from Madrid, where he’s allowed to get on with doing what he wants, with budgets that more than meet his needs. The fact that the films are produced by his own production company no doubt facilitates the process.

This allows him to make this kind of film; one which is about a topic that doesn’t get much airing: the ageing of a middle-aged man. Salvador, played by Banderas, is a film director stricken down by illness. His youthful brio has faded. He mopes. Banderas plays this in a splendidly low-key tone. At one point, pace Hamlet, he offers advice to an actor: don’t cry, don’t force the emotion. Which is precisely what Banderas succeeds in doing. He offers a portrait of a man who has everything but at the same time feels as though his life is lacking. He tries heroin, (a slyly subversive twist, for those who might say that Almodovar has lost his punch; how many other directors casually introduce heroin into their films without it being for heightened dramatic purposes?), he visits old friends, he finds a lost lover, he drifts through doctors’ appointments and, above all - he remembers. Age accrues memory and the more we age, the more memory there is to process. Dolor y Gloria articulates this in three ways: firstly through the reconstructed scenes, staring Cruz, from Salvador’s childhood. Secondly in the lucid and brilliant theatre sequence, where the actor who has appropriated Salvador’s memory text, delivers a soliloquy about the lost lover (which the lost lover happens to see), and thirdly in conversation. There’s something almost Beckettian about all this, albeit a gaudy, gay Beckett, who lives in the kind of apartment with the kind of art one imagines would have made Beckett deeply uncomfortable. 

The sum of all these parts is a meandering movie, with characters who appear and then slip away, with a narrative which is tenuous, contrived, charming. It’s a film of quirky moments and high tenderness. It’s ostentatiously and gloriously self-indulgent. It’s as akin to reading a novel as cinema can be, a loose-limbed novel that celebrates the process of ageing and the exquisite library of memory.