Salvador (Antonio Banderas), is a film director in decline in more ways than one, experiences a series of reencounters. Some of them in the flesh, others remembered from his childhood in the 60s, the pain of the breakup from his first adult love while it was still alive and intense. Ultimately u writing as his therapy to forget the unforgettable; the early discovery of cinema; and the infinite void that creates the incapacity to keep on making films. In recounting his past, Salvador finds the urgent need to discover what he ultimately needs, his personal and creative salvation.
It’s easy to get lost along the road of life and here with Pain & Glory we get an auteur like Pedro Almodóvar doing nothing less the baring his soul for us all to take in with what is easily another incredibly personal movie in the man’s staggering canon of films.
The film does move through some familiar Almodóvar type themes, but it’s really his personal ode to the art of storytelling. It’s got an obviously restrained tone in comparison to some of his other works but it’s this point that allows the real pleasure of it to come through especially with an understated and stellar performance from Banderas as this struggling storyteller.
Pain & Glory is the marriage of memory and moving image which bursts off of the screen with an unimaginable sense of warmth that allows the past and the present to co-exist in a glorious pas de deux.
- Release Date: 9/6/2019
