At this point, how do we talk about Pedro Almodóvar without saying something that has already been said numerous times? The past two decades has confirmed that he’s not only one of the most significant film directors to have come out of his native Spain, but one of the world’s most extraordinary artists, whose work has woven together universal stories that feel both immense and intimate, stretching across genres and showing us a different side of humanity. Whether looking at his earliest films that demonstrated a truly revolutionary spirit that feared absolutely nothing, or his later work that saw the director venturing towards a more melancholy, but no less bold, form of storytelling, Almodóvar’s work has always been incredibly fascinating and deeply moving. They also all stand in relative independence, differing in style and subject, but all featuring the same meticulous attention to representing the human condition in all its idiosyncrasies, and looking deeply into the collective quandaries that tend to plague us throughout life. If there is one film that benefits from looking at the filmmaker’s career in a broader sense, it’s Pain and Glory (Spanish: Dolor y Gloria), a work of relentless brilliance, and one of Almodóvar’s most exquisite, evocative films to date. It is the convergence of a career that has seen him achieve worldwide acclaim, universal recognition as one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation, innumerable awards and most importantly, an artistic vision facilitated by decades of intricate work in a profession he not only adores, but clearly considers vital to his very existence. While it may be premature to call this Almodóvar’s masterpiece, there’s very little doubt that this is yet another one of his exceptionally fascinating forays into existence, this time taking a more personal approach to a story that only someone with the world-weary optimism that Almodóvar possesses could ever hope to create. The only difference is that this time, he’s telling a story a tad closer to home than usual, which is demonstrated with the kind of complex sophistication he’s come to be known for.

While it may be surprising to say, Pain and Glory is, in part, the result of a collaboration, rather than being the product of a singular vision. While clearly based on the life of the director himself, what makes this film even more enduring is how Almodóvar casts Antonio Banderas in the lead role, playing the role based on the filmmaker. Banderas and Almodóvar have a storied history, both being pivotal figures in the beginning stages of the other’s career, and it only seems poignant that Banderas would be the right person to play the role of Salvador Mallo. So much of Pain and Glory depends on Almodóvar laying his own personal history bare, and commenting on the innumerable complexities that underlie it – and very few people seem to understand the director quite like Banderas. To say that he is good seems like an understatement – Banderas gives one of the year’s most incredible performances. He has rarely been this tender and vulnerable, and while he may have had more exuberant roles to play in some of his previous collaborations with Almodóvar, Banderas took on a very different kind of performance here. It’s a restrained, elegant portrait of an artist, and a man, struggling to reconcile his past with the present, in his pursuit of an uncertain future. Salvador Mallo is a film director – yet, we don’t see him direct a film until the very end. He made a film called Sabor in the 1980s, which was critically-reviled on initial release but has now been redefined as a masterpiece (as this kinds of cult classics tend to be). Yet, he’s not happy, and struggles with his own inner quandaries. Banderas finds it within himself to express the character in a way that was subtle, but not without an internal flair. He finds the perfect balance between the different sides of the character and explores them through engaging actively with Almodóvar’s magnificent script. Yet, regardless of where he takes the character, he never loses that spark of authenticity that ultimately makes this such a compelling performance, and something only someone with the intricate understanding of the director’s own process, and a collaborative relationship extending back decades, could have done so effectively.

Pain and Glory is a film that seems to transcend the traditional boundaries of cinematic storytelling – but for anyone who has encountered work by Almodóvar, this is hardly a new concept. There are few directors who manage to celebrate cinema while in the process of deconstructing it and still deliver absolutely beautiful work along the way – he is certainly one of them. The film seems to be a poetic ode to many different ideas, all of which Almodóvar has explored in some way throughout his career, but only seems to be addressed directly for the first time with Pain and Glory. One pivotal element of the film and one that it looks at in detail (albeit from a different perspective) is the artistic process, something very few understand quite as well as him. However, rather than taking a look at the director at his artistic peak, it looks at two moments in his creative career – the genesis of his life as an inherently artistic individual, growing up in a rural village in Spain where his maturity at a very young age was already an indicator that he was to amount to greater things, and the period where he’s no longer a young man, having lost the enthusiasm he had when he was starting his career and finding it incredibly difficult to overcome physical and psychological pain to take the next step forward in his career, especially when he’s overcome with an almost nihilistic sense of the fragility of life and the inevitability of our eventual demise. Almodóvar is exploring two very different stages in the life of a creative, and in looking at how the artistic process is more challenging than most would expect, on both sides of the peak, not only showing the sometimes elusive motivation that comes when someone has a desire to create embedded in their spirit, but the inability to allow it to come to fruition due to external factors impinging on inner creativity, but also showing how the sources of inspiration can sometimes come from the most unexpected places. So much of Almodóvar’s past work has been drawn from his own life, but in very different ways – whether a particular place, individual or idea that he encountered, they all formed indelible moments in his artistic journey, with his individual recollections him in becoming the stalwart of cinema that he’s almost universally regarded as today, a very important aspect of Pain and Glory, but one that doesn’t prompt a celebratory excursion of the director’s work, but rather a more intimate exploration of the impetus behind his enormous successes, where his faults and shortcomings are equally as important as his talents.

The final moments of Pain and Glory realize these deeply complex themes, where we see a gorgeous collision between the artistic process and memory, and their symbiotic relationship in occupying an important place in the life of the main character. Throughout the film, Almodóvar demonstrates the importance of memory in cinematic creation. Revisiting the past is something everyone tends to do, especially when it’s done as a way of working towards a specific future, especially one plagued by uncertainty. Almodóvar’s intention here seems to be celebrating the unpredictability of life, and openly embracing it. While the boundaries between Pedro Almodóvar and Salvador Mallo are not clearly defined, the film has a particular approach to showing the volatility of life and the role it plays in constructing the future, both real and artistic. Ultimately, Pain and Glory embraces the concept of memory, and explores the intricacies of our formative years and how they converge into assembling us into whoever we are set to become. The small joys of childhood work alongside later heartbreaks and eventual traumas to compose the protagonist as an artist, and to serve as his creative inspirations. Early on in the film, Salvador (when commenting on the various maladies he has collected throughout the years), mentions the “mythology of an organism” – and this very simple sentiment carries a great deal of meaning, especially in a film as intent on showing the importance of the smallest experience, whether personal or professional, in creating an artist. Pain and Glory is a film about art, but we only see glimpses of it – a moment from the film, a segment from a stage production, or a brief piece of music. This leads the film to make the most poignant statement, one that we knew all along, but only becomes clear in the final shot of the film – the films of Salvador Mallo was not the art – he was. In the final few scenes of the film, Salvador comes across a drawing of a young man who he recognized: himself, drawn years before by a hired labourer. This serves as his propulsion to return to making films, not only because it demonstrated the importance of art and how it can be eerily resonant, but also how it isn’t always the art itself that matters and should be understood, but also the artist.

Throughout Pain and Glory, Salvador Mallo is shown to be struggling to find the inspiration for his next film, without realizing that he himself is the work in progress. This is precisely what makes this film quite possibly Almodóvar’s masterpiece, because it sees the director making his most personal film, one that draws upon so many different aspects of his own life. It feels like the culmination of a long career, a work of relentless passion by a director who has persisted as a unique, idiosyncratic artist for decades, perpetually producing works that remain firmly within his own unique vision, without ever compromising it for the sake of telling a story by culturally-conditioned parameters. Almodóvar is beloved for many different qualities – his flair and style, his incredible ability to write compelling characters, his blend of pathos and humour, and his intricate understanding of the human condition. These are all reasons why he is so beloved – but the quality that makes him so important as an artistic figure is his fierce independence, which has never been clearer than it has been here. Almodóvar’s frank honesty in Pain and Glory has a certain intimacy – it isn’t a work of vanity, but rather one of brutality. He’s looking back at his career, and his life as a whole, reminiscing on his successes and trying to atone for his failures, and ultimately coming to the realization that the past, as regrettable as it can be, can’t be changed – there’s a pivotal confrontation scene between Salvador and one of his former collaborators where some private information is unintentionally revealed. Salvador’s response is simply that he apologises and knows it wasn’t meant to be said, but “it has been said anyway” – the past can’t change or be forgotten, but it can be used as a tool towards defining whatever comes next. For some, this means simple introspection. For others, like Salvador, it can be used to inspire art, rather than fester into insecurities.

There’s another quality in Pain and Glory that has consistently been considered when talking about this film and what it means – could this possibly be the final film Almodóvar makes? He has often alluded to the fact that he intends to slowly recede from filmmaking, and it seemed like this would be the perfect way to end his career. As we’ve said, it feels as if the director is looking back at his career, and conveying an unflinching honesty in a way that sometimes feels like a farewell. Yet, despite the subject matter, and themes like ageing and the inevitability of death (which are normally used in these kinds of films to signal that this is the artist’s swan song), Pain and Glory never feels like an ending – there is far too much hope embedded between the melancholy for this to be the ultimate chapter in Almodóvar’s filmmaking career. Rather, this is a meditation on his career so far, a work that ruminates on some of his personal and professional quandaries, and allows him to work through them in a way he only knows how. Whether or not this is the final film Almodóvar intends to direct is actually inconsequential, because taken for what it is, we see that it’s about a filmmaker who isn’t sure he can ever direct again – there are many self-imposed obstacles around Salvador, which he knows he can overcome, but lacks the motivation to actually do so. His stubbornness and refusal to challenge his own perspective is the only reason he can’t move forward – and it takes various encounters, as well as a lot of introspection before he realizes that this is not necessarily the end of his career, but the beginning of another chapter. So much of the film revolves around his recollections of a film called Sabor (a thinly-veiled allusion to one of Almodóvar’s many brilliantly transgressive comedies from earlier in his career), but it’s only when he manages to find the willpower to make El primer deseo that he can finally overcome this crisis – naturally, we’d assume the ending of Pain and Glory would feel like the closing of a book, when in actuality, it’s the beginning of an entirely new chapter – and we can only hope that the optimism found in that final scene has the same real-world implications as the rest of the film.

Pain and Glory is simply an astonishing film. Pedro Almodóvar’s journey into his own memory is truly something to behold, and he once again crafts an intricate, gorgeously evocative masterpiece that feels both soaring and intimate. The film has so many of the qualities that make his films so effortlessly brilliant – sentimental humour, delicate melancholy and deep understanding of difficult existential issues that very few filmmakers would ever dare approach with such sincerity. Yet, it’s the aching beauty of this film that makes it so distinctive – Almodóvar gives us momentary access to his past, crafting a soulful exploration of memory and its various intersections with art, and how the two are almost inextricably linked. There is a lot of sadness in this film – Almodóvar’s surrogate character here goes through various tragedies and suffers many ailments, with the director representing his plight with a certain honesty that can’t ever be considered purely the subject of speculation. This is a film made by someone relaying his own experiences rather than evoking them from imagination, which gives this film both its striking authenticity and beautifully emotional core. Almodóvar challenges reality in such a delicate way, finding the balance between fact and fiction, allowing him to tell his story without neglecting the flair that made such melancholy retrospectives like Pain and Glory possible. This is an incredible exercise in recollection, meticulously crafted by a director who provokes thought and composes a bewitching, heartfelt ode to artistry, desire and the human condition. How Almodóvar reconciles all of these different themes into one captivating film that feels both rivetting and sentimental is just further proof that he is one of the most important filmmakers of his generation, and an artist in every sense of the word. Pain and Glory is everything that cinema should be – enchanting, challenging and entirely impossible to dismiss as anything other than purely visceral visual poetry.