‘Bitter Christmas’ review: Lesser Almodóvar has fleeting pleasures

The frailty of the human body has been front of mind for Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar in his recent movies. His Oscar-nominated “Pain and Glory” featured an aging filmmaker fighting chronic back spasms. The English-language drama “The Room Next Door” concerned Tilda Swinton’s war reporter staring down terminal cancer. His characters’ anxieties about illness and mortality reflect his own, and Almodóvar’s latest is similarly interested in notions of legacy and decline.

But although “Bitter Christmas” deals with myriad ailments, it finds the 77-year-old auteur in a slightly more playful mode. Exploring how art can help mediate the inevitable sorrows that visit every life, Almodóvar provocatively layers one fiction on top of another.

Bárbara Lennie plays Elsa, a former filmmaker in Madrid in 2004. Her two features failed to wow audiences, prompting her to pivot to a lucrative, if unfulfilling, career directing commercials. That’s how she met her younger boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), a sweet firefighter and occasional stripper whose club she checked out in the hopes of casting a hunky stud. As “Bitter Christmas” begins, however, Elsa is sidelined by a debilitating migraine. Plus, she’s battling panic attacks, a physiological symptom of the fact that she never properly mourned her mother, who died a year earlier. Elsa is so busy she barely notices that her body and spirit are fast deteriorating.

But before we can delve into Elsa’s woes, Almodóvar reveals a twist: She is merely a figment of the imagination of Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a successful older filmmaker in 2026 who is writing his next script. Raúl hasn’t done a movie in years, but he’s inspired by his memories of suffering panic attacks in 2004, viewing Elsa as a surrogate for himself. (To further illustrate the parallels between reality and fiction, Raúl also has a younger lover, the attentive Santi, played by Quim Gutiérrez.) Over the course of “Bitter Christmas,” we spy fragments of Raúl’s life, but the film primarily stays with Elsa. In truth, the audience learns about Raúl by watching Elsa’s drama unfold.

Working with frequent composer Alberto Iglesias, whose string-heavy score hints at deep wells of melancholy and intrigue that “Bitter Christmas” only intermittently delivers, Almodóvar crafts a bifurcated narrative that’s full of self-examination. Often drawing on autobiographical elements in his pictures, the writer-director has frequently turned personal experiences into vivid cinema — for instance, casting Antonio Banderas to play an Almodóvar stand-in for “Pain and Glory.” (Tellingly, Raúl, like Banderas’ director character, grapples with back issues, a malady that has affected Almodóvar.)

But with “Bitter Christmas,” Almodóvar invites the viewer to interrogate the man behind the curtain — or, rather, the camera. He immerses us in Elsa’s quest to regain emotional equilibrium, but we never forget that her life is completely invented. Of course, so is Raúl’s, who like Elsa doesn’t want to believe his best years are behind him. If Raúl is working through his own traumas by creating Elsa, it’s enticing to speculate on Almodóvar’s reasons for making Raúl his onscreen surrogate.

Like so many of the director’s films, “Bitter Christmas” is a feast of bold colors, beautiful clothes and even more beautiful faces. Almodóvar may no longer be the impish troublemaker of his youth, but he still luxuriates in the liberating pleasures of sex and love — especially during a lusty flashback in which we discover how Bonifacio seduced Elsa. “Bitter Christmas” may be knowingly clever in its story-within-a-story structure, but there’s nothing arch or cynical about Almodóvar’s sympathetic approach. Like him, we are all storytellers, actively scripting a narrative of ourselves that may be comic or tragic. But there’s no denying the passion we put into these tales.

And yet, despite these many small lovely moments — and Lennie and Sbaraglia’s soulful turns — “Bitter Christmas” proves to be a case of the thematic whole being less than the sum of the potentially captivating parts. For all of Elsa’s travails as she makes peace with her repressed grief and rediscovers her voice, her spiritual searching is nullified by the realization that it’s nothing more than a product of Raúl’s subpar musings. Likewise, as Raúl tempts fate by borrowing liberally from the lives of others — in particular, his selfless assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) — his section of the movie falls flat because he’s a cipher whose artistic vampirism is not particularly compelling.

As the film winds to a close, Raúl is warned that his latest opus may only be a minor effort. Great directors have their share of “minor” works: movies that don’t aspire to lofty heights but are nonetheless worthy of note. One wonders if Almodóvar, through the modestly underwhelming “Bitter Christmas,” is admitting to fears of someday becoming Raúl, a diminished filmmaker with little new to say. He needn’t worry. Even “minor” Almodóvar has its strengths, although it’s ironic that, by laying bare his history as a creative magpie, he ends up a bit blocked.