Pain and glory, mind and body

Desire is an itch in the mind that is scratched by the body, an enabling – or disabling – vehicle that Pedro Almodóvar dissects in his semi-autobiographical feature. Pain and Glory portrays Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) at a stagnant time in his filmmaking career, 32 years after his notorious collaboration with actor Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia) in Sabor, concluding with highly-publicized tensions between them. For Salvador, the ensuing three decades of grudging silence were marked by bodily ailments until, one day, he revisits a newly-restored Sabor that propels him to reconnect with Alberto.

Finding Alberto and hearing about his last thirty years, Salvador encounters a life of work and opportunity that he forfeited due to illness. Crippled by backache, a windpipe that triggers involuntary choking, and a cranium battered by migraines, Salvador is a creator who has succumbed to his physical limits. Eager to dull his pains and driven by self-destruction, he discovers heroin for the first time in Alberto’s backyard and, in what becomes a series of heady reveries, Salvador returns to his childhood in 1960s Paterna, Spain.

As Salvador revisits his past, the motif of water surfaces. A symbol of adaptability, persistence, clarity, and overcoming, water is the river by which a young Salvador played and where his mother washed sheets; it is the sound of a man bathing beneath a skylight; it is the wash of color in a painted portrait; and it is, in present-day, the therapeutic pool that numbs sensation and the solvent to medicated recovery. For Almodóvar, water connects past and present time. For Salvador, water is desire. Together with his mother’s overwhelming presence in memories of the past, water is intrinsically tied to the initial realizations of Salvador’s first desires in learning, teaching, creating, and sexuality.

Desire forged Salvador’s successful filmmaking career, cast him into a mad romance in 1980s Madrid, and perhaps even facilitates his ongoing demise. His life as an artist has not been without sacrifice and Salvador slowly realizes this in recalling his past. In leaving Paterna, Salvador left his mother, who only until her final moments chides Salvador for having not been a good son. Film and love are his languages and, in pursuing creative release and romantic freedom, Salvador first sacrificed family. Later, when he ended his love with Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), he still had film. But when Sabor failed him, he went silent. Has desire now become painful, has pain become desired?

Salvador allowed physical limitations to dominate his mind, giving it the time, attention, and energy that once fueled desire. The ache of today has removed him from a past self that was hopeful, hungry, and able. His present inabilities are cradled by fear – of creativity and the introspective scrutiny of artistic creation. So, when Alberto discovers and proposes to co-produce a monologue titled Addiction that Salvador wrote about his time with Federico, Salvador rejects him. But after reckoning with the thirst to create again, Salvador strips the autobiographical work of his own identity and gives Alberto full accreditation, detaching himself from the events of the play.

Consequences are fickle, though, and Salvador’s anonymity becomes a sobering irony, for who stumbles upon Addiction but the single other person relived in the story. Federico walks back into his former lover’s life, visiting Madrid for the first time in 30 years, and Salvador again faces his past. As Federico tells of his wife and children, Salvador is pained by the seeming ease with which Federico, as with Alberto, created new life from despair. The undeniable love that remains between the former lovers, however, forces Salvador to realize that desire is not meant to be pursued once and then abandoned when it becomes unbearable. No, desire is an innate addiction and to desire means to have the strength and courage to resume. Indeed, it is the “to” in “to desire” that gives possibility to what otherwise only holds promise.

Emerging from his stupor, Salvador wills himself to resume. In using his failing body to protect himself from the emotional densities of film and love, his mind became his body’s challenge and his body his mind’s obstacle. While he perhaps sought pain, he never could sacrifice desire, for it is a restless itch, an artful addiction. Forging self-creation from destruction, Salvador is finally seen behind the camera directing scenes from his heady childhood reveries in his new film, The First Desire. To see this will to desire is, ultimately, glorious.



Featured in Cinema Skyline: Volume V.