Pain and Glory

Pain and Glory follows Salvador Mallo, a Spanish film director in his sixties whose body is failing and whose work has stalled. A restored screening of an old film reunites him with its lead actor and reopens his past: a childhood with his mother, a first awakening of desire, and a love affair he never fully mourned. Past and present fold together as he takes stock.

Critics received the film as Almodovar turning his camera on his own vocation, weighing what a lifetime of pictures has cost and given back. Antonio Banderas, who took Best Actor at Cannes in 2019, plays the director with restraint, holding grief and appetite in one quiet register. Reviewers read Salvador as a near self-portrait grown from a long partnership between actor and director.

For a psychodynamic clinician, the film stages memory of the mother as the organiser of a life, chronic pain and creative block folding into one another, and desire from decades past that keeps its charge. It traces reparation in late life, as old wounds are named and partly set right, while mortality presses on every scene without tipping into despair.