The small stuff of words

Pedro Almodóvar and Antonio Banderas at their peak ... Pain and Glory reviewed by Miss Lumière ... Life, loves, memories, and loss ... An artist's reckoning of a life lived 

Almodóvar and Banderas

Pain and Glory is Pedro Almodóvar's Remembrance of Things Past, minus the Proustian portentousness, interminable close-ups of madeleines and around a thousand hours of life.

It is evidence of an artist at the unflinching, melancholy apotheosis of his cinematic powers - a profound reflection on love, loss, creativity, memory, desire and forgiveness, mainly of himself.

In a lesser director's hands this might have come across as unbridled narcissism, but Almodóvar makes it quietly, tenderly universal.

He is grasping at the elusiveness of a life lived, from the perspective of a successful but isolated older man, creatively stymied and riddled with physical and mental ailments, and through the lens of a series of highly romanticised flashbacks from his childhood.

These scenes, interspersed with several re-encounters in the present day, form the film's narrative passage, although much more passes beneath the celluloid as Almodóvar turns his camera and his compassion inwards.

While Almodóvar has been frank about the autobiographical nature of Pain and Glory, it is nevertheless a real surprise to find how emotionally candid he is willing to be.

This from the director who gave us masochistic housewives, homicidal drag queens, nymphomaniac nuns, murderous lawyers and romantic stalkers.

Almodóvar's trademark and oft-time vulgar, campy exuberance for life has mellowed into an understanding of what makes us human, including our failings.

Casting his long-time friend and collaborator Antonio Banderas as himself is vain, brilliant and totally inspired. 

Banderos knows Almodóvar well from their days trolling through the wild, gay underbelly of Madrid in the 80s. 

He starred in three early ground breaking Almodóvar films - Labyrinth of Passion (1982), Matador (1986) and Law of Desire (1987)  - outlandish, sexually charged responses to the repression suffered by Spaniards under Franco.

As the Almodóvar character in Pain and Glory, director Salvador Mallo, Banderos gives perhaps the finest performance of his career - equal parts eccentricity and pathos.

The film begins with a stylised memory sequence from Mallo's childhood, showing his young mother Jacinta (the always impeccable Penelope Cruz) with other poor women, washing and drying their clothes by the gently rolling river (of his imagination).

They sing a folk song with great joy and we see young Salva close by her side.

The spirit of that happy scene, infused with loss, sets the tone for many of the interactions in Pain and Glory - between Mallo and  Alberto (Asier Etxeandia) the actor he fell out with 32 years ago, between Mallo and his former great love Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia) the beautiful young man he lost to heroin, and most movingly between Mallo and his dying mother (exquisitely played by Julieta Serrano).

Nothing much happens in these scenes, except what is said and felt.

It is Almodóvar's genius that he makes utterly moving cinema out of such small stuff as words - all set against his signature backdrop of riotous colour and design. 

Pain and Glory is a mature artist's reckoning, not only with himself, but life itself. 

It is both painful and glorious. Don't miss it.