Sweet Inspiration
By Matthew Eng
New York Film Festival 2026:
Bitter Christmas
Dir. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, Sony Pictures Classics
If there is a signature image in Bitter Christmas, the feature by Pedro Almodóvar, it may be an early POV shot of an ailing woman urgently jotting down her thoughts in the margins of a book, which rotates before the camera to accommodate her panicked scribbling. The diarist is Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a director whose first two films were commercial failures that have since gained cult followings but not before propelling her into a lucrative career helming commercials. She is a woman on the verge not of a nervous breakdown but an artistic breakthrough, the protagonist of an ambling, erratic drama set during the 2004 holiday season in Madrid. She is also only partially the product of Almodóvar. Elsa is, as we come to learn, the avatar of his avatar, Raúl Rossetti (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a gay, middle-aged filmmaker of august stature struggling to flesh out his latest screenplay in the present day after a five-year drought. What Elsa and Raúl share, aside from an author and a penchant for buff, adoring younger men, is a willingness to pilfer from the private lives of those closest to them and incorporate sensitive details and fraught dynamics into their scripts.
Bitter Christmas has been regarded as something of a homecoming for Almodóvar after a handful of curious short and feature-length forays into English-language filmmaking. It features all the expected hallmarks of a contemporary Almodóvar production: Chavela Vargas needle-drops, unabashed interior design porn, conspicuous Prada placement, and a saucy, squeal-inducing Rossy de Palma cameo. But it is also one of his more intricately structured and conceptually sound films, an internal auteurist audit that rigorously questions the authenticity of inspiration for not just any aging artist but this particular aging artist, a veritable movement unto himself. (If one counts Folle... Folle... Fólleme Tim!, the undistributed film that Almodóvar shot on Super-8 in 1978, then Bitter Christmas marks the director’s 25th feature.)
Almodóvar is likely aware of the prevailing impression, these days more suggested than stated outright, that he is a visionary still capable of inspired work but coming down from the other side of his creative summit. (At a screening I attended, I sat beside a veteran journalist and infamous Courtney Love defamer who applauded the director’s mononymous title card and proceeded to snooze throughout the movie’s midsection.) Between his momentous reunions with stars such as Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz and his excavations of personal and national histories in Pain and Glory (2019) and Parallel Mothers (2021), legacy has clearly been weighing on the 77-year-old Almodóvar’s mind for quite a while. This preoccupation has taken more oblique forms, too: consider how the single most electrifying moment in The Room Next Door (2024), in which Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton struggled to parlay cumbersome dialogue into an emotional connection, may very well be its prominent interpolation of John Huston’s The Dead (1987), a sublime, mortality-minded swan song made in the final months of its director’s life.
“Cinema can be a bit premonitory,” a spooked Elsa tells her genial boyfriend Beau (Patrick Criado), a firefighter and part-time stripper, from a hospital bed. But Almodóvar is not concerned here about the demise of the body as much as the imagination. Swerving between 2004 and 2025, the film is in large part a series of heart-to-hearts and battles of will between Elsa and her intimates, which mirror and deviate from those transpiring between Raúl and his own. Though dense with incident, the plot is more digressive and peripatetic than labyrinthine, easy enough to follow but devoid of the slippery, coiling pull of Almodóvar’s sturdiest melodramas. Characters keep supplanting each other in importance or, less charitably, utility, and are moved, without explanation, to the narrative’s periphery. Beau—whose meet-cute with Elsa is preceded by a striptease that plays out, as only Almodóvar would allow, to the entirety of Grace Jones’s “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango)”—is shunted aside in favor of friends whose personal trials become dramatic fodder for the rejuvenated writer-director. Elsa retreats to the volcanic island of Lanzarote for a white wine–soaked, pseudo-Persona sojourn, first with Patricia (Victoria Luengo), a glum, trusted colleague beset by her husband’s philandering, and then with Natalia (Milena Smit), a reclusive model withered to a husk of herself by the accidental death of her young son.
Almodóvar juxtaposes Elsa’s shameless poaching with the relationships in Raúl’s life that are brazenly funneled into an increasingly inconsequential script. The casual discarding of Beau reflects Raúl’s own neglect of a buff, subservient younger boyfriend (Quim Gutiérrez), while Natalia’s sorrow is lifted secondhand from the experiences of Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), his longtime assistant and unofficial script doctor who has recently retired in order to tend to her crisis-stricken partner. It is Raúl’s third-act betrayal of Mónica and her subsequent retaliation that expose the true intent of Bitter Christmas, an astringent meta-text that Almodóvar considered titling The Limits of Self-Critique. Notwithstanding the performance of Lennie, who wears her character’s torment lightly, even sinuously, there is a focus and thus a vivacity fundamentally missing in Elsa’s story. But this lack of concentration, this descent into the prosaic and downright insipid, is exactly the point of Almodóvar’s project, which portrays a filmmaker’s artistic drought in the slyest, ballsiest way possible—by putting an inferior movie on the screen.
The director has described Bitter Christmas as “the film where I’ve been cruelest with myself.” He is indeed brutal in his self-regard, stripping himself for parts and sharpening his scalpel to pierce his beloved persona, never more than in the lengthy confrontation that occurs between Raúl and Mónica in the gardens of Madrid’s El Retiro, where nothing about Almodóvar is deemed off-limits; even his grief over his mother’s passing comes under harsh scrutiny, pinpointed as a maudlin, excessive fixation. Mónica’s argument is aided tremendously by the exemplary performance of Sánchez-Gijón, so fervent in her fury and so bracingly lucid in her outrage that she tips the scale considerably in Mónica’s favor during her final war of words with Raúl. It is his once-selfless helpmate who exposes the hard truth that Raúl’s indiscriminate leeching leads to nothing but lackluster art, for his powers of perception have dimmed, perhaps irretrievably, over time.
The scene abounds with petty put-downs and bloodletting blows, but it pivots around a deeper question of unmistakable import to Almodóvar at this stage of his career: is the drive to create truly genuine or symptomatic of the competitive, insatiable urge to stay relevant and viable amid the evident waning of one’s heyday? Mónica places Raúl, which is to say Almodóvar, in the company of totemic cinema luminaries like Bergman and Fellini when she mentions that he doesn’t need to return to the director’s chair after five years away, that he has given audiences enough major (and minor) work to savor and evaluate for five lifetimes. But something in Raúl, which is to say something in Almodóvar, cannot bring himself to rest, to become the type of celebrity doyen who does little more than accept plaques from indistinguishable LGBTQIA+ organizations and jet to Qatar for money-laundering film festivals, all the while playing the role of the idle, well-compensated éminence grise. No innovator wants to admit that they’re biding their time at the end of the trail they audaciously blazed. Purgatory is presented here as a filmmaker lounging and lunching with his boy toy, too consumed by a conversation about buying a villa with a heated pool to wipe away the crumbs collecting in his beard.
I am not so sure that Almodóvar has to fear a decline. Pain and Glory, released under a decade ago, certainly ranks among his greatest achievements, brimming with the exultant, misty-eyed emotionality that he readily jettisons on this go-around. He remains masterful enough to end Raúl’s story on a wistfully inconclusive note, involving the tabling of a likely inevitable lovers’ parting, spurred by the realization that one’s partner has become one’s hostage. And he is ultimately less invested in resolving the tiresome debate about how much lived experience belongs in fiction than he is in dissecting his late style and interrogating the artistic ambitions that have not slackened whatsoever but instead mutated and metastasized during the so-called winter of his career. Bitter Christmas will be either catnip or anathema to auteurists, but it is above all a reminder of Almodóvar’s own vitalizing acuity, his abiding inclination for audacity and perpetual aversion to the safe bet and the dominant trend. (When all is said and done, he would still rather say something nice about David Cronenberg than sign a development deal with Netflix.)
It is no surprise that his characters have returned time and again for comfort and catharsis to the mighty, leather-tough musicality of Vargas, a queer comrade and eternal influence, whose 2004 corrido “Amarga Navidad” gives the film its title. (Vargas took to calling Almodóvar her “spouse” later in life when he became one of her most ardent champions, eventually arranging her Carnegie Hall debut in 2003.) After an alcoholism-induced absence that lasted for more than 15 years and convinced many devotees that she had died, the Mexican grande dame returned with a vengeance and kept performing until the bitter end, speaking the lyrics that she could no longer sing. She continued to pour all of herself into a voice never lost, only transformed.