Pain and Glory: Almodóvar's "Trepidation"

Author: Liu Pengbo

At the age of seventy, Almodóvar brought with him his twenty-second personal work, Pain and Glory. The film was a spectacular fit for this year's Cannes Film Festival, and was still shortlisted for the main competition section even though it had been released in Spain ahead of schedule, which was the highest courtesy of the Cannes Film Festival to the veteran director. The field score was as high as 3.3, and the film eventually won the Best Actor Award. As a Spanish national treasure director, Almodóvar is a regular at the Cannes Film Festival, and almost every one of his new works will be treated at the highest level, winning many awards.

"Pain and Glory" tells the life of a director who once had unlimited scenery but is now in a creative crisis, And shows The double pain of Salvador both physically and mentally. He suffered from headaches, tinnitus, low back pain, and indirectly caused mental anxiety, insomnia, fear from physical pain... More seriously, as a director who regards making films as a life, Salvador's inability to write and shoot is tantamount to killing him.

Salvador began taking drugs under the influence of Alberto, which triggered Salvador's hallucinations. In many places, the film flashes back to his childhood and youth through images of Salvador half-dozing or sleeping. Salvador lived in poverty as a child, his family living in cellars, his over-attachment to his mother, and the initial desires evoked by the painter in his young body. He met his first love Federico in his youth, and the two made good memories of their vacation in Argentina. These past events allowed Salvador to get out of his depression, find creative inspiration, and rekindle the desire to live.

The film follows a regular linear time, interspersed with hallucinations, memories and dreams to show Salvador's past life. The film is informative, building a huge gallery of characters around Salvador's multiple identities: assistants, actors, his parents, painters, first love boyfriend Federico, and a teenage church school, pastor, and choir. But the whole story is told smoothly, without making people feel redundant and delayed.

As a semi-autobiographical film, "Pain and Glory" naturally reminds us of the famous Italian director Fellini's masterpiece "Eight and a Half Parts". As the first work to show the director's creative and life difficulties, "Eight and a Half Parts" almost exhausts all the narrative elements and techniques of this motif. But any future director who wants to make an autobiographical film cannot escape the shadow of "Eight and a Half Parts". It can be said that Fellini is not making a movie, but a tradition. After him, many directors came up with their own "Eight and a Half Films." For example, Woody Allen's "Stardust Past", which is a tribute to Fellini, and Hong Shangxiu's many works set as directors as protagonists, also give us the feeling of "Eight and a Half Parts".

Almodóvar's Pain and Glory is no exception, and Pain and Glory can be seen as Almodóvar's personal Eight and a Half. If we combine Almodóvar's personal history, we can find that the plot of "Pain and Glory" overlaps a lot with his life experience. For example, Almodóvar's childhood misery, his participation in choir as a teenager, his homosexual love... Even the difficulties of creation in later years undoubtedly have a tendency to refer to themselves.

Pain and Glory is the third installment of Almodóvar's "Desire Trilogy." The "Desire Trilogy" has a strong autobiographical color of Almodóvar, the first two films "The Law of Desire" and "Bad Education" tell the love story of Almodóvar in his youth and the sexual assault of a priest in his youth, and "Pain and Glory" is his autobiography of nearly seventy years old. Compared with the wild and chaotic style of the first two stories mixed with pain and desire, "Pain and Glory" is warm and emotional, and people seem to be moving. Pain and Glory has been unusual throughout Almodóvar's creative career, and while Pain and Glory continues to feature elements of religion, homosexuality, and drugs, there are fewer more extreme direct physical violence such as homicide and transgenderism, which are essential elements of most of Almodóvar's films.

Almodóvar said pain and glory was inspired by Fellini's Eight and a Half, but it wasn't a simple tribute. Compared to Fellini's Baroque style of extreme splendor, Pain and Glory is too approachable. In the style of Almodóvar's past works, his and Fellini's films give people the feeling of "random flowers and charming eyes". But in Pain and Glory, Almodóvar uses "subtraction" quite restrainedly, not only in terms of plot, but also in terms of technique, as simple as possible, such as just using flashback to bring the audience back to Salvador's past life, thus establishing a three-dimensional image of the character. At the same time, the extremely fierce emotional conflicts in previous movies have also become simple and natural. However, one thing has not changed, that is, Almodóvar's use of color in the picture is still full and rich, with a typical Spanish style.

Almodóvar has always been considered one of the best male directors to shoot women, and is particularly good at portraying the psychological world of female groups. But there are also a few films that focus on the male world, and the men in these films invariably become the object of Almodóvar's criticism. He once said, "Women can provide me with comedy material, while men can only make me write tragedies." "Pain and Glory is yet another work that presents the male world, but perhaps because it is Almodóvar's autobiography, it pours warmth and tenderness into it. What men bring to Almodóvar is no longer tragedy, but love and care—pain, but glory. (Liu Pengbo)