At this stage in Pedro Almodóvar’s career, autobiography and fiction have become increasingly difficult to separate. “Pain and Glory” turned memory, filmmaking, desire, and regret into something resembling a fragmented self-portrait. His latest, “Bitter Christmas,” pushes that impulse even further, building a movie around an artist who cannibalizes his own life—and those closest to him—to start creating again.
Sony Pictures Classics has released the official U.S. trailer for the film, which stars Bárbara Lennie and Leonardo Sbaraglia across two interconnected timelines.
The first story takes place during a long weekend in December 2004 and centers on Elsa (Lennie), an advertising director whose life intersects with her boyfriend Bonifacio and her friends Patricia and Natalia. The second jumps forward to 2026, where Raúl (Sbaraglia), a screenwriter and director suffering through an extended creative drought, begins writing a screenplay.
Eventually, the connection becomes clear: Raúl is writing Elsa’s story. But Almodóvar complicates the arrangement by making Elsa something close to Raúl’s alter ego. As the filmmaker digs into himself for material, he also begins transforming his partner, assistant, and intimate circle into characters.
That slippery exchange between lived experience and invention feels particularly suited to Almodóvar, whose films have always treated storytelling as something personal, unstable, and capable of reshaping the past. Here, though, autofiction itself becomes the subject: who owns an experience once an artist turns it into a story, and how much distance can really exist between the person writing and the people being written about?
The ensemble also includes Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Victoria Luengo, Patrick Criado, Milena Smit, and Quim Gutiérrez. Meanwhile, longtime Almodóvar collaborator Alberto Iglesias composed the score, which won the Cannes Soundtrack Award following the film’s Cannes premiere.
Our Cannes review found plenty of Almodóvar’s familiar visual and dramatic pleasures while suggesting that its elaborate metatextual construction sometimes keeps the emotion at arm’s length. Still, that self-consciousness appears fundamental to what Almodóvar is after: a movie about the strange process through which messy private experience becomes cleanly shaped fiction.
“Bitter Christmas” will also screen at the New York Film Festival before Sony Pictures Classics opens the film in New York and Los Angeles on November 13. It expands nationwide on November 25. Watch the trailer below.
