Jmunney's Blog

CREDIT: Sony Pictures Classics

There are two moments in Pain and Glory that really hit me and made me go, “This! Is! Cinema!” The first comes when an animated sequence accompanies Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) telling us about how he learned about the subjects he should have learned in school by instead experiencing them later in life. Hurray for mixed media! The second is the meta ending, which I don’t want to spoil, in case anyone reading hasn’t seen it, but I do want to talk about it, so I suppose I’ll throw in a SPOILER WARNING. It turns out that the flashback scenes with a young Salvador and Penélope Cruz as his mom are actually a film-within-the-film directed by the adult Salvador, and that is such a lovely framing device. [END SPOILER WARNING] And one more thing! There’s a terrifically funny scene in which Salvador and his leading man Alberto (Asier Etxeandia) skip a post-screening Q&A they were supposed to attend but then phone in and the audience gets to hear the vicious, but also slapstick argument they get into. As is typical of Pedro Almodóvar, Pain and Glory is liable to make you laugh aplenty and go, “What a thing it is to be alive!”

I’ll go ahead and give Pain and Glory 11 Chases out of 15 Dragons.