Spanish maestro Pedro Almodóvar returns this year with Pain and Glory, which found success during its release in Spain and festival debut at Cannes, and will now arrive at TIFF and NYFF before an October bow. Starring Antonio Banderas, along with Penelope Cruz, Asier Etxeandia, Julieta Serrano, and Leonardo Sbaraglia, the director takes a meta look at his own career as we follow a film director reflecting on his life. Sony Classics have now released the first U.S. trailer.
Ed Frankl said in his Cannes review, “Pedro Almodóvar, the punk chronicler of post-Francoist Spain, turns inwards for his 21st feature Pain and Glory, which arrives in competition at Cannes as a summation of his storied career, a quasi-self-portrait of an artist as an older man. Even for Almodóvar, this is an especially personal work, anchored by the director’s on-off muse Antonio Banderas in perhaps his greatest performance and sweeps through the Spanish maestro’s recurrent themes: high melodrama and kitsch comedy, piety and carnal lust, sex and death, human pain and transcendent glory.”
See the trailer below.
PAIN AND GLORY tells of a series of reencounters experienced by Salvador Mallo, a film director in his physical decline. Some of them in the flesh, others remembered: his childhood in the 60s, when he emigrated with his parents to a village in Valencia in search of prosperity, the first desire, his first adult love in the Madrid of the 80s, the pain of the breakup of that love while it was still alive and intense, writing as the only therapy to forget the unforgettable, the early discovery of cinema, and the void, the infinite void that creates the incapacity to keep on making films. Pain and Glory talks about creation, about the difficulty of separating it from one’s own life and about the passions that give it meaning and hope. In recovering his past, Salvador finds the urgent need to recount it, and in that need he also finds his salvation.
Pain and Glory plays at TIFF and NYFF and opens on October 4.