Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Pain and Glory
2019 · Pedro Almodóvar · Pain and Glory on Sightlines
Sun on whitewash. A village in Valencia in the sixties, sheets drying in the open air, a house dug back into the rock, a young mother (Penélope Cruz) and her small son. The light is too good. No childhood was ever lit like that while it was happening. Now the other room in this film: a Madrid apartment of deep red and cobalt, art on every wall, a man in his sixties sitting inside it with a body that hurts and a career that has stopped moving. That apartment is a near-replica of Pedro Almodóvar's own. The man is played by Antonio Banderas, whom Almodóvar discovered four decades ago. Keep both rooms in mind. Pain and Glory is the traffic between them.
Salvador Mallo cannot make a film. In most movies that would be a starting gun. A character perceives a problem, acts on it, and the action changes the situation; Gilles Deleuze called that circuit the movement-image, and it runs almost all commercial cinema. Almodóvar switches it off in the first reel and never switches it back on. The pain isn't cured. The block isn't argued away. Salvador looks, remembers, and endures, and Deleuze has a name for a character like that: the seer, voyant, someone who has become too aware to act and who therefore sees. The images belonging to such a character he calls pure optical and sound situations — moments when nothing is available but looking and listening, so that time stops being the measure of an action and becomes the thing you are actually watching. Banderas plays it hushed, physically careful, self-mocking. He took Best Actor at Cannes for a performance built almost entirely out of stillness.
That alone would make this one more slow film about a tired man. What earns the vocabulary is what Almodóvar does with memory.
The ordinary flashback is what Deleuze calls a recollection-image: a dated scene fetched out of a former present and entered as evidence. This is why he drinks. This is the wound. The past shows up handcuffed to an explanation. Almodóvar's Valencia is dated too — the sixties, a particular village, a particular poverty — and it explains nothing. Knowing the cave house and the mother tells you nothing causal about the sick man in Madrid. The scenes are not testimony. They are a place he can go.
Deleuze, following Bergson, has the better model: sheets of past. The past is not a line stretching behind you with events pinned at intervals. It coexists, whole, in regions of different depth, and remembering means leaping into a region and moving around inside it. This film keeps at least three regions in play and refuses to rank them: the sixties in the village, the eighties in Madrid (the Movida years, the era that made the real Almodóvar a scandal), and a present of immeasurable emptiness. You don't travel between them by cause. You travel by wanting. The memories arrive as a mosaic summoned by desire rather than by plot, and that is the film's own proposition, stated in its structure long before anyone says it aloud: desire is what a filmmaker runs on, and the film is the act of refueling. Almodóvar makes desire the principle of montage. That is a real invention, and it is why the film never feels like a man rummaging in a drawer. The cut goes where the appetite goes.
Now the strange part. Deleuze's crystal-image describes a shot where a thing and its own reflection trade places so fast you can no longer say which is the original — the actual and the virtual, indiscernible. Pain and Glory builds one at the scale of the entire production. The set is a copy of the director's apartment. The character is a version of the director, played by the actor the director discovered, whose career is itself part of the material. When Salvador remembers an actor he worked with, we are watching an actor the filmmaker worked with. And then the final movement quietly reframes everything you have just seen, folding the memories back inside the work, which is the film's way of saying what the story keeps circling: the creation cannot be separated from the life. Deleuze also describes the crystal with a fissure in it, a cracked crystal, a line of flight out of an otherwise sealed world. The crack here is narration. Telling the past is what gets him out of it.
Two more things the film runs on. One is the body. Deleuze's late cinema of the body attends not to what a character does but to what a body holds: posture, fatigue, the arrangement of a man on a sofa. Salvador's ailments, and the chemistry he meets them with, are this film's clock. The other is colour. Almodóvar's lifelong debt is to Douglas Sirk, whose Written on the Wind built feeling into lacquered primary-colour art direction so the walls could say what the dialogue withheld. Deleuze's affective colour names exactly that: a colour that absorbs a scene and its emotion rather than decorating it. What is new here is the temperature. The Movida provocateur used that saturation for hysteria. The same reds and cobalts now hold calm, and rue.
The ancestry is worn openly. 8½ supplies the whole template: the blocked director whose paralysis dissolves the wall between present, memory and staged fantasy. Wild Strawberries supplies the aging artist who walks into his own past inside the same frame. Amarcord supplies the sun-struck childhood sequence — whitewash, drying laundry, a boy's first awareness of adult desire — which Almodóvar restages in the cave house. The Spirit of the Beehive supplies the Spanish grammar for it, light moving through whitewashed rooms and a child who watches. And his own Law of Desire supplies Banderas, and the premise that a gay artist's life is legitimate material. What Almodóvar adds is the reframe, and casting as memory: a film whose production history is part of its subject.
The lineage runs mostly backwards here; the film is too recent for its children to have shown up yet. What it hands forward is a method. Since 8½, the artist-block film has been a film about the film that cannot get made. This one ends by being the film, with no confession-theatre and no squalor. It says that a man's past is not evidence to be presented but fuel to be burned, and it lets you watch the burning.
So watch it again, knowing where it lands. The second time, every memory already has the film inside it, and you will catch yourself asking the question Almodóvar leaves open: whose memory is this — the man's, or the movie's?
Concepts in play
- sheets of past (order of time / coexistence) — Three coexisting strata held without hierarchy — the sixties in the Valencia village, the eighties in Madrid, and the present of 'immeasurable emptiness' — entered as a mosaic 'summoned by desire rather than plot' rather than as a causal chain.
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — The protagonist's apartment is a near-replica of Almodóvar's own, and the alter ego is played by Antonio Banderas, the director's discovery four decades earlier; a filmmaker remembering the actors he worked with, performed by the actor the filmmaker worked with — actual and virtual become indiscernible at the level of the production.
- cracked crystal — 'The need of narrating his past can be his salvation' — and the structural twist, a final movement that quietly reframes everything preceding it by folding memory back into the work, opens a way out of the sealed apartment/self.
- the seer (voyant) — Salvador Mallo, body failing and incapable of continuing to film, does not act on his situation; he watches and remembers. Banderas plays him hushed, physically pained, self-mocking — a performance built out of stillness.
- pure optical and sound situations — A creative block and a chronic body that no action resolves; the film's present is given over to looking, listening and drifting rather than to any effort that changes the situation.
- recollection-image (image-souvenir) — The dated Paterna cave-house flashbacks — the sixties, the whitewashed village, Penélope Cruz as the young mother — arrive with the form of the classical flashback but carry no explanatory function for the present.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — The film is organised around an ailing body and its postures — 'body failing', physically pained, hushed — with duration carried by physical state rather than by events; Banderas took Best Actor at Cannes for it.
- affective colour — Saturated reds and cobalts inherited from Sirk's Written on the Wind, where primary-colour art direction carries feeling the dialogue withholds — here turned from eighties Movida hysteria to the calm and rue of the late style.