Pedro Almodovar’s ‘Bitter Christmas’ Draws Upbeat Reviews in Spain

First reactions to Pedro Almodovar’s “Bitter Christmas” (“Amarga Navidad”) – one of the highest-profile contenders predicted to be selected the Cannes Film Festival on April 9 – are already in, at least from his native Spain where Almodovar’s latest opened March 20. 

Most reactions, especially from Spain’s biggest newspapers and specialist film publications, are good to great. 

“‘Bitter Christmas’ is a “masterpiece,” announced El Mundo, one of Spain’s most influential newspapers. Almodóvar delivers his “deepest, rawest and most complex film and even the most imperfect one in a cruel study of the motives behind creation,” it added.

El Periódico de Catalunya called “Bitter Christmas” as a “precise, serene melodrama.“ It could be seen, it went on, as a “prolongation in a different register”of Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory,” which won Antonio Banderas Cannes’ actor award in 2019, playing a figure not so distant in many ways to Almodovar himself.  

Almodóvar’s return to Spanish-language filmmaking is “autofiction, exploring the limits of the relationship between life and fiction” with a “film director once more as the lead, the absence of the mother figure, prolonged mourning, more reflections on the creative process, physical pain and medicaments and the songs of Chavela Vargas,” El Periódico de Catalunya noted.  

Other reviews to date, however, have begged to differ in their enthusiasm. “Pedro Almodóvar muses on the creative process in a personal, messy drama,” said Screen Daily. “We’d have been more interested in an Almodóvar who’s less wrapped up in himself and more caring about his stories not being sketchy and distant,” reproached El Diario Vasco.

Produced by Pedro and Agustín Almodovar’s El Deseo, opening in cinema theaters in Spain before possibly being chosen for Cannes – a practice for Almodóvar which dates back decades and is allowed for by Cannes¡ ruling on premieres – “Bitter Christmas” will hit over €2 million ($2.3 million) in box office in Spain over the April 3-5 weekend, El Blog del Cine Español predicted April 4. That puts it on track to end up with $2.9 million-$3.1 million. 

That figure would beat Almodovar’s English-language Venice Golden Lion winner “The Room Next Door” ($2.8 million) with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, and end up on a broad par  with 2021’s “Parallel Mothers,” ($3.1 million) starring Penelope Cruz.    

Shot with Almodovar’s hallmark blending natural tones, single color blocks, perfectly composed frames and often gorgeous apartments and setting to die for – such as a chalet in the Canary Islands’ Lanzarote – the challenge of “Bitter Christmas” is also what splits critics most: a film-within-a film-structure and focus on Almodovar’s own creative process. 

This features Elsa, a commercials’ director (Barbará Lennie) writing a film script in 2004 inspired by the suffering of friends. Elsa’s story is quickly revealed as fiction, written by Raúl, a film director in 2026 (Argentina’s Leonardo Sbaraglia, an Almodovar look-alike in his flamboyant bouffant white hair).

Rarely will a top-notch auteur voice in a film his own doubts, fears and contradictions including about the film spectators are seeing, such as when Raúl confesses his fear, for example, that the film he’s writing – making up much of “Bitter Christmas” – will been seen as a lesser work, destroying in one stroke his worldwide prestige. But Almodóvar does here, and has at least one character subjecting Raul’s screenplay, and so Elsa’s story, to serious criticism of its faulty structure.

“I wanted to shake a little the totemic figure of a director, showing his weaknesses and faults though not abuse, question whether he has the right to do everything he does,” the director said at a pre-opening press conference in Spain, calling “Bitter Christmas” “the film where I’ve been cruelest with myself.” 

For many of its fans, “Bitter Christmas” displays a “brutal honesty” and a “remarkable and original structure,” as top Spanish radio network Cadena Ser argued. For detractors, the film’s emotions lacks emotional impact.

One scene has registered with most everyone, however. In Elsa’s tale, she meets Spanish singer-songwriter Amaia, whose character delivers a rendition of Mercedes Sosa’s 2009 “Song of Simple Things.” Striking a gathering sense of melancholy in Almodóvar’s work, “Love is simple and simple things are devoured by time,” Amaia sings, in a scene written by Raúl, Almodóvar’s alter ego, who admits to now dedicating his life to his film craft.  

“In this scene and the song is the heart of the film for me,” Almodóvar has said.