Almodóvar has spent forty years turning his own life into gaudy melodrama. In Pain and Glory he does something braver: he stops turning it into anything. He simply looks.
Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) is a celebrated film director who has stopped directing. His body has become an inventory of ailments — back, throat, migraines, an inflamed spirit — and he narrates them to us with a hypochondriac's grim relish while his apartment, a magnificent red-and-cobalt shrine of art and objects, sits around him like a beautiful mausoleum. A restoration of one of his old films forces him to reconnect with Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), the actor he fell out with thirty years ago. Alberto introduces him to heroin. Almost as an accident, chemistry unlocks memory, and the film begins to move backwards: to a childhood in a whitewashed cave-house in Paterna, to a mother (Penélope Cruz) washing sheets in a river and singing, to a young labourer whose body the boy Salvador looks at and does not yet have a word for.
Banderas won Best Actor at Cannes for this and it is not a sentimental award. He has worked with Almodóvar since he was a beautiful young provocateur in the 1980s; here, at sixty, greying, deliberately made up to resemble the director himself, he gives a performance built almost entirely on restraint. It is a portrait of a man who has retreated so far inside his own body that the smallest emotional contact — an ex-lover appearing in his doorway (Leonardo Sbaraglia, in a scene of extraordinary adult tenderness) — nearly undoes him. Julieta Serrano, as the aged mother, delivers a deathbed scene of reproach that lands harder than any of the film's louder moments: she tells her son that he was a bad son, and he cannot argue.
Almodóvar's usual sensory maximalism is all still here — José Luis Alcaine's saturated colour, Alberto Iglesias' aching score, the ravishing production design — but it has been redirected from spectacle towards feeling. The film's central argument is that art is not therapy and does not redeem you; it is simply the only thing you know how to do with the pain, and it is enough. The final shot, a small formal trick, reframes everything you've watched and doubles as Almodóvar's own confession of method.
Some may find it too becalmed, too pleased with its own melancholy; there is a stretch in the middle where introspection thickens into inertia. But the compensations are enormous.
Verdict: Almodóvar's autofiction, and one of the great films about ageing, desire, and the debts an artist owes the people they mined for material. Warm, wounded, and quietly devastating. Watch it for: Banderas' career-best work; the reunion scene with Sbaraglia; that closing shot.