Pain & Glory: Seeing Almodóvar’s Hamlet: A reflexive Masterpiece
Throughout this film, we see posters of Hamlet and the analogy of the play within a play (and the equally important film within a film) becomes a highly interactive model of the reflexive nature of this film. It reflects the auteur career of Almodóvar whilst making the auteur concept problematic – indeed making literate writing and the creation of visual art itself also problematic. A question is there throughout: who guides the hand of the writer as he learns? The film shows the supreme command of medium and its metalanguage, that it fully authorises (is that the right word) a film that feels like a highly romantic encounter of self with self. The characters are themselves as much as they are archetypal roles in the process of first desire (an important and problematic placement in the film), coming out and queer reversals. It is unclear by the end whether anyone is not merely an authorial projection from within a highly complex mind. For me it is a film about love. Expressed, enacted, repressed, inverted, reversed through all kinds of passages inside and outside the pained body of the hero. A man who can’t ingest without choking is like a man who cannot internalise his love and falls sick of desire, forever avoiding it through repetitive and addictive actions (heroin, cocaine, involuntary truth-telling).
This ‘review’ is a deliberately gnomic piece because it would be so easy to ‘spoil’ a film like this, so important are the turns and surprises of telling stories and the roles which story-telling takes on within it. So important that the central turning-point of the play is a man telling someone else’s story as if his own, to an audience who might turn out to know its meaning better than he. And just as Hamlet’s ‘Speak the speech as …’ speech to the player visiting Elsinore is at the heart of what it means to enact feeling in Hamlet, so the film director’s direction (that only bad actors cry, good ones visibly restrain tears) has a similar function in Pain and Glory. See that theme grow until it becomes part of the addiction theme elsewhere in this film. And try and restrain your tears. Neither my husband nor I could quite do that. Beautiful, intelligent, wise and wonderful – in the fullest sense of those terms.
And the mothers – magnificent. Manipulation that is almost wicked and love, pure love.
Steve
Steve_Bamlett_blog 
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