Played by Antonio Banderas in hedgehog hair only slightly less upstanding than Almodóvar's own wild and woolly 'do, filmmaker Salvador Mallo has fallen into a dreadful funk just as a restored 30-year-old film of his goes into re-release.
Bad education almodovar analysis movie#
Movie Interviews How A Heart Attack Brought Antonio Banderas Closer To 'Pain And Glory' The film is an elegiac fiction from the viewpoint of a director in early old age, but it cuts so close to the bone of Almodóvar's own aging that he used furnishings and clothing from his own Madrid apartment, transformed into a place of primary-colored artistic delights that its owner is too bummed to enjoy. In Pain and Glory, which completes Law of Desire (1987), which launched Banderas' career, and Bad Education (2004) in a trilogy centering on filmmakers navigating passion and loss, Almodóvar recreates his own history from his childhood in rural Spain in the sixties through his first real love affair amid the sexual freedom of post-Franco Spain. Every Almodóvar film fairly drips with auto-fiction, mostly in disguise and sometimes in drag. "I don't like auto-fiction," she adds with a note of acid reproof we rarely hear from the devoted maters, blood and surrogate, who people Almodóvar's movies.įorgive the director, on- and off-screen, his evasive grin. Late in Pedro Almodóvar's wonderful new drama, Pain and Glory, there comes a tough and tender flashback in which a filmmaker hears from his elderly mother (Julieta Serrano) that the neighbors don't like being portrayed in his movies. Antonio Banderas plays a film director searching for meaning after his physical decline interferes with his ability to create.