I'm not sure how many other films have so insightfully and compassionately championed art as a profession best achieved and maintained through personal pain. There's something incredibly powerful in seeing it in the realm of filmmaking through the medium of cinema, as we are effectively placed into the metafictional and reflexive nature of the art. We're subjected to a specific vision -- in this case, of an aging director still dealing with his lifelong pains -- of the world, and shown the ways in which his life and his art intertwine. And it features Antonio Banderas in his best role and performance in years.
Banderas, continuing his lengthy history of collaborations with writer-director Pedro Almodovar, plays Salvador Mallo, a stand-in for Almodovar himself whose name contains all the letters of the real-life artist's mononym. The movie takes place later in the fictional director's career, and the inciting incident here is Mallo meeting with his former star, with whom he has some bad blood. Mallo thinks poorly of his star Alberto Crespo (and once-friend, seemingly) for his performance, which Mallo views as being negatively influenced by Crespo's heroin usage. But in order to deal with his own chronic pain and emotional/intellectual/professional uncertainty, Mallo decides to try heroin himself. It's the sort of consciously dangerous and irresponsible but hopefully fruitful sin that will allow him to create again. Or he will succumb. But this isn't a story about the dangers of artists using drugs, or of addicts unable to separate art from reality. If there is a difference.
Instead, it's a beautiful meditation on how art works in a life devoted to it. Though the film is structured in strict measure and sometimes feels a little forced, its deliberate moves are accessible and fairly easy to follow. Most notable in flashbacks that depict scenes from Mallo's childhood that include his mother (Penelope Cruz) and Eduardo, a young worker whom Mallo teaches to read and write and who probably sparked a sexual awakening in Mallo. These scenes are, in the end, revealed to be scenes from Mallo's newest film, one that embraces potentially painful memories and relishes in the art of personal experience. This isn't some Terrence Malick impressionistic arthouse experiment in biography that forces the audience to wonder if there are connections between scenes we see. It's a calculated, heartfelt, but stone-cold sober journey to artistic enlightenment with no small dose of heartfelt autobiography along the way.
Yet Almodovar and Banderas together stop the film from feeling overly sentimental or maudlin. Banderas is not doing an impression of his director. Mallo might be one of the most grounded, fully realized characters of an Almodovar feature: complex and utterly, impossibly believable. Despite the somewhat episodic narrative, the film's exuberant use of color and set decoration breathe a living, dynamic theatricality to the proceedings. And when, in the film's emotional climax, Mallo's past lover returns and we see that the seeds of drug dependency were planted in their relationship, things finally coalesce into an emotional toll. A question is raised as to whether the pain of troubled relationships ruined Mallo's art; Mallo's dismissive response reveals that without these pains, he would have never reached his own glory.
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