Bitter Christmas Amarga Navidad Special Presentations
Tickets
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About
Christmas comes early this year, in the form of Pedro Almodóvarr’s latest confection, a sly comedy about the perils of autofiction. It boasts not one but two Almodóvarian alter-egos in Barbara Lennie and Leonardo Sbaraglia as acclaimed but currently uninspired filmmakers who turn to the messier lives of their assistants and friends for story material (much to their chagrin). Bitter Christmas displays the control and authority that we have long since become accustomed to from this master of cinema: narrative sleight of hand, a dazzling colour palette that leaps from the screen, rich performances that span the spectrum from tragedy to farce and all stops in between.
In the circumstances, to reveal more of the plot(s) would risk spoiling some delicious surprises, so let’s just say that this is generally in a lighter mode than the equally self-reflexive Pain and Glory; it’s a mischievously meta mea culpa from a modernist simultaneously transfixed and transported by the image of cinema as an infinitely suggestive hall of mirrors.
In the circumstances, to reveal more of the plot(s) would risk spoiling some delicious surprises, so let’s just say that this is generally in a lighter mode than the equally self-reflexive Pain and Glory; it’s a mischievously meta mea culpa from a modernist simultaneously transfixed and transported by the image of cinema as an infinitely suggestive hall of mirrors.
