‘Bitter Christmas’: even the feelings are by design. There you | Cinema: premieres and reviews

I don’t know who invents certain terms, or what interests they serve, but they make every god (I exaggerate; some of us are allergic to them) continually use them to explain the human and the divine. Especially the political caste. And a notable part of the media. They are expressions like “the story” and “resilience.” And regarding artistic genres, autofiction has now become fashionable.

In recent times, literary and cinematographic creations do poorly in sales, at the box office and in critical appreciation if they are not autofictions. That is, converting intense and intimate personal experiences into apparent fictions. And if anyone in the world of cinema is aware, tributary and exploiter of new fashions, of what is cool or going to be cool in different eras, it is Pedro Almodóvar.

Consequently, he resorts to autofiction to tell us about a creator who vampirizes the intimate and tragic experiences of his most confidential environment to invent his new film. That’s what I deduce by seeing, listening and suffering Bitter Christmas. Or maybe I haven’t figured out what the plot is about, it being all intense, dramatic and supposedly complex. But for me it only causes tedium, unhealthy perplexity; It is another design exhibition in which the storm of feelings also seems to be design.

And at no point does the sense of humor, grace, irony, sarcasm appear, virtues that I recognize in some of this man’s films. Not exactly in his craziest comedy, an infamous little thing called The passing lovers. Now he is only obsessed with transcendence, the incurable wounds of the soul, the accumulation of misfortunes, the accumulation of pills under the tongue and the continuous visits to the emergency room to be able to endure the panic and anxiety attacks, the unsuccessful suicide attempts, the inconsolable loss of the most loved ones. And may that unfortunate emotional physical material serve to create greater art through images and sounds.

For a time that seems endless to me, I cannot find a relaxed posture in the cinema seat in front of the accumulation of nonsense with a solemn aura that the screen emits. That unpleasant feeling of other people’s shame even invades me. I am only slightly relieved by the presence of a certain Bonifacio, Boni to his friends, firefighter and stripper for very drunk ladies celebrating bachelorette parties. This Boni, who is also an underpants model, takes care of the depression and fierce migraines of his unlikely girlfriend, a cult director (what a mess explaining what critics define as cult films) through sex and in hospitals, who, having failed, dedicates herself to earning a fortune through spots advertising. I imagine that this couple will fuck a lot and well, but I don’t imagine them constantly discussing the mysteries of the human condition. I don’t believe anything, of course, including that unthinkable relationship, but that guy causes me a certain tenderness in the midst of a torrent of impostures. And I am still not very clear that this intimate material, or at worst the director explains it terribly, is useful for the script that the tormented director is perpetrating.

Dialogues, characters and sequences populated by suffering and dejected women who cannot stand the cuckolding or have suffered the loss of what they loved most parade before my tired eyes and astonish me at their ridiculousness. Well, it only relieves the laughter that escapes me when that vampiric director reaffirms his right to plunder because Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman did it too. This Almodóvar does not cut corners in his legitimate desires for greatness. In the next he can be compared with Edward Hopper, the sublime painter of loneliness, or, for that matter, with William Shakespeare, the unsurpassed portraitist of the human soul. Nonsense abounds in this dark drama. But the least that can be demanded of them is that they have a point of grace.