September Film Review
by @saidonescottishlady
When does your life become someone else’s story?
One of the things I find fascinating about writers and filmmakers is how much of the people around them inevitably ends up in their work. However fictional the story, there are usually bits of real life hiding somewhere in it: a relationship, a conversation, a personality trait, an argument, a heartbreak. Sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes only the people who know the artist well will recognise it.
And what happens when they do?
That’s the question sitting at the heart of Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas, and it’s what I found most interesting about the film.
It tells two stories across two timelines. In 2004 we meet Elsa, a filmmaker struggling with grief and trying to get back to writing. In the present day we meet Raúl, an older filmmaker who is writing a screenplay which turns out to be Elsa’s story. Elsa is, in effect, a fictional version of Raúl himself — and the people around him are becoming material for his art.
It sounds complicated. It is complicated.
And, as with quite a lot of Almodóvar’s films, I understood what was happening while I was watching it, but afterwards I found myself struggling to remember exactly how all the pieces fitted together. There are the two timelines, then the film within the film, and then the constant shifting between what is real, what is remembered and what is being invented.
But perhaps that blurring is the point.
Almodóvar has always drawn heavily on his own life and experiences, and Bitter Christmas feels like him turning that process inside out and asking whether an artist actually has the right to use the lives of the people closest to them. Raúl’s assistant Mónica, in particular, becomes part of the story he is creating — without necessarily consenting to the version of herself he has put on the page. The film eventually becomes a rather wonderful argument about the price other people can pay for somebody else’s creativity.
It’s something I’ve thought about myself.
I’ve often thought that I’d like to write my own story. But the moment you start thinking about doing that, you realise that your story is full of other people. You can’t write about your childhood without writing about your parents. You can’t write about your career without writing about the people you worked with. You can’t tell the story of a relationship without telling somebody else’s story too.
And whose version is true?
That’s what makes Bitter Christmas more than just another piece of Almodóvar autofiction. It’s an exploration of the rather uncomfortable relationship between life, memory and fiction — and the arrogance, or perhaps necessity, of believing that your experience is yours to turn into art.
There is something wonderfully defiant about Almodóvar’s attitude to this. He seems to be saying: Yes, I take things from the people around me. Yes, I turn them into stories. And yes, I have the right to make my art.
But he is also clever enough to question himself.
That’s what stayed with me. Not necessarily the detail of the plot, but the idea of an artist taking the people they love, reshaping their lives and putting them on screen — and then asking whether they were entitled to do it in the first place.
Fascinating, but hard to remember.
Coat On or Kettle On?
Worth the trip, or worth the wait?
I enjoyed it, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in Almodóvar, filmmaking or the creative process. It’s distinctive, beautifully made and gives you plenty to think about.
But for me, this is one where the ideas are more compelling than the need to see it on a cinema screen. I’m glad I watched it; I’m just not sure I’d put my coat on and make a special trip to the cinema for it.
If you have any feedback on the column, please send to saidonescottishlady@me.com