Bitter Christmas review grief, loss and artistic betrayal in Almodovar's film within a film

A film with warm, summery colors and a Christmas setting avoids typical holiday trappings like tinsel, sleigh bells, and gift shopping. It follows an indie filmmaker, Elsa, who has shifted from making films to shooting TV ads, while her younger partner works as a firefighter and part-time lapdancer. The story centers on grief and loss, and on how art can feed on people, creating betrayal when fictional characters are based on real individuals. The work uses layered, self-referential filmmaking and open-ended melodramatic storytelling, mixing modernist noir tones with telenovela-like structure. It also includes a pointed anti-streaming gag while still feeling like streaming television at times.

"With its rich, warm, summery colours, nothing could surely be less bitter or less Christmassy than this film. It's the latest from Cannes competition regular Pedro Almodovar, partly set during Christmas; the female lead actually complains about the yuletide traffic at one stage. But there's no tinsel or sleigh bells or shopping for presents. Like Die Hard, it eludes classification."

"It's another which is to say, yet another double-layered creation by Almodovar, a kind of movie auto-metafiction of the sort that he has virtually invented, a life-v-art dialectical process that he is evidently unable to do without. Like the recent Pain and Glory, Bitter Christmas is a candidly personal movie, circling around ideas like grief, loss, the vampirism of art and the betrayal involved in basing fictional characters on real people."

"Perhaps by emphasising this last point, Almodovar is pre-empting or cauterising a crisis in his own life, showing us a gay male artist's perspective on the question of whether women are not being given enough credit as the wellspring for inspiration or indeed as artists themselves. The result is a complex, slightly muddled, almost surreally modernist noir-melodrama or open-ended telenovela of the sort he habitually offers."

"In the mid-2000s, an era of fliptop phones, Elsa (Barbara Lennie) is a struggling indie film-maker now reduced to shooting TV ads; her younger boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado) is a firefighter and part-time lapdancer whom she met at a club on a hen night when she went backstage to offer him the lead in her upcoming underpants commercial."

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