Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Bitter Christmas
2026 · Pedro Almodóvar · Bitter Christmas on Sightlines
Somewhere in Bitter Christmas a blue sweater matches the hospital screens exactly. Tara Brady caught it in the Irish Times, and once you know about it you start seeing it everywhere in the film. No one's clothes match a hospital by accident. Someone picked that blue. In most films that someone would be a costume designer, out of sight. Here it is also a character, because the hospital, the sweater and the people around them all exist inside a screenplay that a man in the film is writing.
That man is Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a celebrated screenwriter-director in the present day. The woman is Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), who directs commercials and, over a long December weekend in 2004, is grieving her mother while fighting migraines and a creative block. She copes by working at a pace only a panic attack can stop. Raúl is writing her out of his own life. Almodóvar cuts between the two layers, about twenty years apart, and gives most of the running time to Elsa's story, which Chris Bumbray rightly called deliberately soapy. It is the melodrama Raúl is making, though the film takes its time letting us know that.
Gilles Deleuze had a word for this kind of image: a crystal. A crystal-image fuses what is actually in front of us with its double, whether that is a memory, a reflection or a fiction, so closely that we can't say which one came first. Deleuze counted the film within a film among the crystal's classic forms, because it makes a movie show its own making. Hold Bitter Christmas up to the light that way and its structure stops looking like a gimmick. Elsa is the fiction and Raúl is the man at the desk, but the grief Elsa carries comes out of Raúl's life. The film hands a mother's death to a woman, the displacement Almodóvar has long used to write about himself. Each side of the crystal reflects the other. Teresa Font cuts so that each layer comments on the other, and Liam Gaughan heard a rhythm in it that was almost musical. Some critics found the first half busy or overcomplicated. The crystal explains the feeling. The film won't let you settle in either layer, because neither one is the original.
Then there is the color, which Deleuze took more seriously than most philosophers of film. In his account of the affection-image, a color can soak up a whole scene and carry a feeling that nobody in it has yet expressed. That has always been Almodóvar's method, and Pau Esteve Birba's photography takes it as far as it goes: a bright red Jeep on Lanzarote's black volcanic sand, egg-yolk yellow knitwear, turquoise kitchen appliances, a cerulean lampshade. Here the color does a second job. It is the feeling Elsa can't say, and it is also the fingerprint of the man composing her. David Jenkins argued that Almodóvar's craft has become so assimilated it no longer announces itself. The frame story gives it a new voice anyway. Every perfect interior that Antxón Gómez designed is also evidence that Raúl arranged it. The bare black ground of Lanzarote, inherited from Broken Embraces, is the starkest backdrop the color plays against.
Elsa's crisis follows a pattern Deleuze would recognize. Her answer to grief is action: more work, faster. That is the logic of the classical cinema he called the action-image, where a character meets a situation and acts on it. The panic attack breaks that circuit. Deleuze described the modern break in exactly those terms, as characters who can no longer respond adequately to what happens to them. Rory Doherty found the panic-attack sequence genuinely affecting, and it is a bodily event the camera can't fully show, so Alberto Iglesias's score, which won the Cannes Soundtrack Award, has to make us feel it. This is the moment in the film where performing stops working.
The last concept is the one that names Almodóvar's real subject. In his late writing on what he called the powers of the false, Deleuze's forger isn't a liar. He makes truth by turning into other people, and in the films that interest Deleuze the forgers form a chain in which no final, true self is left standing. Almodóvar has been building that chain for forty years: Eusebio Poncela as the writer-director in Law of Desire, Lluís Homar in Broken Embraces, Antonio Banderas in Pain and Glory, now Sbaraglia. Alistair Ryder called Lennie's Elsa an Almodóvar surrogate as well. So the surrogate has his own surrogate, and she is a woman, the device Almodóvar first used in The Flower of My Secret. Classical film asks us to trust that the image shows a world. Autofiction asks for something more delicate, that we trust the life behind the fiction. Bitter Christmas shows that life being turned into fiction, and the people around Raúl, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón's weary Mónica among them, being turned into material along with it.
That changes what the frame can do in an Almodóvar film. Pain and Glory turned out to be, in part, a film about its own making. Bitter Christmas builds that reveal into its structure instead of holding it as a last-minute surprise. Bad Education had already let a staged film compete with its frame story and swapped identities between an author and his characters. Law of Desire had asked what it costs to use the people closest to you. All About My Mother had shown mourning moved onto a stage and into friendships between women, and you can feel that here in Elsa's circle of friends. Bitter Christmas gathers all these debts and turns them on the man who incurred them. Almodóvar told the London Review of Books it was the riskiest film he had made. The risk is that his signature style becomes evidence in the case against him.
The film is too new to have heirs, so the question it hands on is still open: can a cinema made from a director's own life also be a judgment on that life? Watch it again for the blue sweater, and for every color that seems exactly right. Ask who chose it: Almodóvar, Raúl, or Elsa in her grief. The film is made so you can't quite tell, and that is the point.
Concepts in play
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — The nested structure: Elsa's 2004 story, which takes up most of the film, is a fiction Raúl writes from his own life in the present, and Teresa Font's cutting lets each layer comment on the other. The same emotional material is staged twice, once as life and once as the fiction made from it, and the maternal death is handed from the author to his female protagonist.
- the forger (le faussaire) — Raúl turns his private material and the people around him into a screenplay. He is the latest in a chain of filmmaker stand-ins (Poncela, Homar, Banderas, Sbaraglia), and his own surrogate is a woman, Elsa, whom Ryder called an Almodóvar surrogate.
- affective colour — Orchestrated clashing color: a red Jeep on black volcanic sand, egg-yolk yellow knitwear, turquoise appliances, a blue sweater matched exactly to hospital screens. The color carries grief the characters don't speak, and it also marks Raúl's authorship.
- crisis of the action-image — Elsa answers her mother's death with relentless work until a panic attack forces her to stop. The sequence is an internal bodily event that Iglesias's score has to make felt (Doherty).