Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) is a 2019 film directed by Pedro Almodóvar.
Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) is a Spanish film director, and a gay man. Salvador is beset by various infirmities, such as chronic back pain and migraines, issues serious enough that he hasn't directed a film in years. If that weren't enough, he is developing a new problem, some sort of malady that is making it painful and difficult to swallow.
Salvador is told that one of his early films, Sabor ("Flavor") has been given a restoration. He is invited to come to a special screening of the film along with the film's star, Alberto Crespo. The only problem is, Salvador and Alberto had a falling-out on the set of Sabor and haven't spoken in 32 years since the film was completed.
Salvador decides to make amends and pays Alberto a visit. Alberto, as it turns out, is a heroin addict, although a high-functioning one. Salvador asks to try some, and begins self-medicating with heroin to manage his chronic pain. Salvador's heroin use begins sending him into blissful reveries, where he remembers his childhood, growing up poor with his strong-willed mother Jacinta (Penélope Cruz).
Tropes:
- And Starring: Almodovar's longtime collaborator Penelope Cruz gets an "y la colaboracion especial de Penelope Cruz" credit.
- Animated Credits Opening: The opening credits run against an abstract animated background, which sometimes looks like geometric patterns morphing like in a kaleidoscope, and sometimes looks swirling and colorful like a film of soap on water.
- Author Avatar: Salvador Mallo is basically a fictionalized Pedro Almodovar. Both Almodovar and his creation are gay film directors that deal with chronic pain and infirmities. In-Universe, Mallo makes movies derived from his own life just like Almodovar does. Antonio Banderas is actually made to look something like Almodovar, with Almodovar's upswept hair. (Reportedly the real Almodovar went on the record that he doesn't self-medicate with heroin.)
- Brutal Honesty: Salvador and Alberto haven't spoken for over thirty years after Salvador deplored Alberto's performance in and heroin use on the set of Sabor. At a Q&A after the screening of the restored film, Salvador is asked about his working relationship with Alberto, and he can't resist once again talking about how Alberto's heroin use resulted in him giving what Salvador regarded as a bad performance. Alberto is outraged, but they get past it.
- Contrived Coincidence: Salvador gets a random, unsolicited invitation to an art gallery. The picture on the brochure is the watercolor painting of Salvador that Eduardo did many decades ago, which the gallery owner picked up at random in a knickknack shop.
- Education Mama: Salvador's mother Jacinta, who is poor and illiterate and wants better things for him. She forces him into seminary school because it's the only way for a poor person to get a good education. When Salvador rebels, saying that he doesn't want to become a priest, she tells him he can always drop out later.
- Flashback: The film has many flashbacks that tell the story of Salvador's youth, how his mother Jacinta was desperate that he escape their illiterate poverty, and how young Salvador discovered his own sexuality. Subverted in the final scene. It's revealed these were actually flashforwards; Salvador has gotten back into moviemaking and is shooting a new film about his childhood, The First Desire. What we thought were flashbacks were actually scenes from that film.
- Functional Addict: Alberto is clearly an addict; at one point he calls his heroin use "slavery". But a regular heroin habit hasn't interfered with Alberto's cushy lifestyle in a nice house, and Alberto can also manage his heroin use, throttling back when he needs to get ready to put on a one-man show of Salvador's essay.
- Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In-Universe, Salvador is unusually popular in Iceland. He gets an invitation to go there.Salvador: I don't understand why they like me so much in Iceland.
- Hands-On Approach: Salvador touches Eduardo's hand in a scene where he's teaching Eduardo how to write, and the camera shows this in close-up. Nothing comes of this, as Eduardo is straight and Salvador is a boy of maybe 12 in any case, but it foreshadows how an attraction to Eduardo will be Salvador's sexual awakening.
- If It's You, It's Okay: Salvador's old lover Federico reveals that after they broke up, he spent decades married to a woman and has two sons. He's getting divorced, but he currently has another girlfriend. However he is still attracted enough to Salvador that he offers to stay the night. Salvador gently turns him down.Federico: My experience with men ended with you
Salvador: I don't know how to take that.
Federico: Take it as a compliment. - LGBT Awakening: Salvador is 12 or so when he sees Eduardo, a grown man and a manual laborer, naked. Salvador's swoon is how he realizes that he is gay.
- Male Frontal Nudity: From handsome Eduardo as he sponge-bathes in the Mallo family home. This is how young Salvador learns that he is gay.
- Never Learned to Read: Eduardo the laborer and Eduardo's girlfriend. Young Salvador, a promising student, teaches Eduardo to read in return for Eduardo doing some work on Salvador's family's house.
- The Noun and the Noun: Pain and Glory
- The One That Got Away: Federico, Salvador's old lover from the early 1980s. Federico's heroin use drove them apart, after which Federico moved to Argentina, kicked heroin, and married a woman. Salvador wrote a whole dramatic monologue about his messy affair with Federico, one that Salvador's friend Alberto puts on as a one-man show.
- Proscenium Reveal: The last shot of the movie reveals that the flashbacks from Salvador's childhood that have been seen throughout the film are not flashbacks, but are actually scenes from a film Salvador is making about his own childhood called "The First Desire".
- Time-Shifted Actor: A boy and Penélope Cruz play Salvador and Jacinta in the flashbacks, while Antonio Banderas and an older actress play them decades later.
- Write What You Know:
- In-Universe, Salvador had a habit of doing this in his films, drawing from his life and the people of his hometown. His mother dislikes this, telling him that the people of their village think he makes them look like "hicks".
- At the end, Salvador is back to filmmaking, starting a project about his mother and Eduardo called "The First Desire".
