Pain and Glory: tender and delicate autobiography

Pain and Glory is one of the most tender and delicate movies by director Pedro Almodóvar. Autobiographical, and with Antonio Banderas as his alter ego, the story deals with the glory of the past and the pains of the present. Film director Salvador Mallo (Banderas) becomes an elderly man and turns away from the profession, facing illness, depression and declining success.

The movie begins with Salvador plunged, in the present, in a swimming pool. In silence and without breathing, it cannot be precisely said whether he is dead or alive. The fluidity of the water mixes with that of another water, that from the past, where the director, as a boy, accompanies his mother and her washerwomen colleagues in their work and in their songs.

The movie's first narrative is between a Spanish director and an actor who became a star when he starred in his film Sabor (Flavor). The story, which could be Almodóvar's relationship with Banderas, is now relived with Banderas in the role of the diretor. A great Asier Etxeandia plays Alberto Crespo, the actor that Mallo hadn't talked to in 30 years because he thought the drug had hurt his performance.

The relationship is remade, but the affections are tense, sharp, culminating in Crespo using the dragon (heroine) and Salvador asking to try the drug. What follows is a trip to the past where the director's mother (Penélope Cruz) is with him as a boy at a railway station where they will travel to meet her father in another city.

Back in the present, a metalanguage exercise turns The Addiction into a confessional text from Salvador that is given for a theatrical presentation in the form of a monologue, by Alberto. During the performance, a man cries. In the dressing room, he reveals himself as Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the great love of Salvador's life, in a moving interpretation.

With health increasingly poor, the director undergoes a definitive medical examination. Will there be salvation for Salvador (“savior” in Spanish)? The scene of the train station with the boy and his mother is repeated, no longer as a reminiscence, but another story.

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