After his first English-language feature film “The Room Next Door” (Golden Lion in Venice), master director Pedro Almodóvar (“Talk to Her”) returns to his homeland – and consistently focuses on himself: After the autobiographical drama “Suffering and Glory”, “Bitteres Fest” once again offers a self-reflexive game, but shifts the focus from Almodóvar’s life story to his life as an artist. Artfully convoluted and deliberately melodramatic, a drama unfolds that fascinates even when it runs the risk of getting lost in its own construction. While Almodóvar convinces in individual scenes with a ruthless examination of his own creative process, the actual story only has a limited emotional impact, which is also due to the filmic experimental arrangement, which follows the resulting scripts.
The successful director Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is making slow progress with his new script with the working title “Bitter Festival”. Set in 2004, the unfinished script follows Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a once-acclaimed filmmaker who has landed in advertising and lives with her caring partner Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), a firefighter and stripper. After her mother died a year ago, she threw herself into work and increasingly suffered from mental and physical problems. Due to a panic attack, Elsa decides to take a break and travels to Lanzarote with her friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo) and her child. There she begins to work again on a script that has been lying around for a long time, whereby the levels of what she has experienced and what she has imagined increasingly overlap…
Almodóvar’s alter ego No. 1: Leonardo Sbaraglia as Raúl.
To what extent can art make use of (other people’s) life stories? And when does inspiration become appropriation or perhaps even exploitation? Already in “Suffering and Glory,” the mother portrayed by Julieta Serrano (“Matador”) accused her son of transforming her life and that of her neighbors into his scripts. “Bitter Fest” now takes this idea and takes it to the extreme by making the creative process itself appear as a form of “vampirism”. Once again, Pedro Almodóvar negotiates his own role as an artist, but this time in a more radically fragmented way. With Raúl and Elsa, he establishes two alter egos through which the film unfolds like a matryoshka of (screenplay) realities. However, this construction is not a means to an end, but rather the actual core of the film.
“Bitter Festival” is less interested in a classic story than in the conditions of its own creation and the question of where the ideas actually come from. Leonardo Sbaraglia (“Wild Tales”) embodies Almodóvar’s deputy – almost as a counterpart to Antonio Banderas’ director character in “Sorrow and Glory” – with a convincing mixture of control and fragility. “Bitter Fest” jumps back and forth between Raúl’s real life and the script reality created on his laptop. He starts typing and the scene changes to Bárbara Lennie (“Open Secret”), while another of Raúl’s lines of text is highlighted in color. Lennie embodies the director’s second alter ego with a withdrawn presence that allows the inner pressure of her character, who is marked by extreme headaches and grief, to shine through at all times.
A script within a script
The intricate structure and colorful costumes, in stark contrast to the landscapes of Lanzarote, are reminiscent of Almodóvar’s Torn Embraces. But where filmmaking was exposed as an emotional game in this film, the script-within-a-script construct is now dedicated to the creative development process before the actual shooting. The convoluted story only becomes clear little by little. Sometimes “Bitter Festival” gets lost in its own structure, for example with scenes that hardly advance the story. In addition, Almodóvar tends to repeat already established ideas, which is not good for the narrative dynamics.
The appearance of the singer Amaia Romero, who impersonates herself and sings a song by Almodóvar’s muse Chavela Vargas to Elsa and Bonifacio, is touching in itself, but has no narrative consequences. Characters appear and disappear again without really being necessary. Even secondary strands, such as a long strip scene by Bonifacio in front of jeering women or the short, amusing appearances by Rossy de Palma (“Kika”) and Carmen Machi (“Volver”), seem more like references to Almodóvar’s earlier, playful, frivolous films. Even the Christmas motif in the title remains purely functional, as its main purpose is to make medical or psychological consultation more difficult.
Almodóvar’s alter ego #2: Bárbara Lennie as Elsa.
In a discussion between Raúl and Mónica, the previously loosely told film finally condenses into a clear thought construct. Everything boils down to this central dialogue scene that carries the film and in which Aitana Sánchez-Gijón (“Parallel Mothers”) in particular excels as an actress. The sequence seems like a direct, merciless dialogue between the director and himself. This self-questioning gives substance to what was previously seen.
Otherwise, Almodóvar remains true to his style in what is now his 24th feature film: precisely composed images, rich colors, a pronounced love of interiors. At the same time, the impression arises that these devices are used increasingly self-referentially, almost as if the film comes from a closed Almodóvar cosmos. The characters also seem to move in an almost hermetic world of pain and emotional overload that hardly allows any connections to the outside world.
Conclusion: “Bitter Fest” revolves around the vampirism of autofiction and the fear of creative exhaustion of an aging artist in a convoluted script-within-a-screenplay construct. In his self-reflective work, Pedro Almodóvar is less interested in major conflicts or surprising twists and more in the fragile relationship between life and art and his worry that at some point he will no longer be able to tell anything. It is visually well-styled and is supported by strong individual scenes, but at times it seems too introspective and unfinished – as does the script itself. In the somewhat cerebral old work, one misses the great urgency and emotional force with which the Spanish master director boasted in “Suffering and Glory” just a few years ago.