Both well-acted time periods don’t have the pay-offs they deserve.
I’ve been to the Chicago International Film Festival last month, and I have seen Pedro Almodovar’s last two entries there. In 2024, it was “The Room Next Door,” and this year, it was “Bitter Christmas,” or as it is known in Spanish as “Amarga Navidad.” So, it feels so authentic to seeing the filmmaker provide stories worthy of being shown at an international film festival like this.
“Bitter Christmas” is something I wanted to enjoy. It has a passion for screenplays and the characters created for them. And it knows how to provide the humor and honesty within them. The funniest is when the main heroine explains the meaning of “cult films” to a nurse. And the sincerest emotions come with the choices of the character development. But I’ve decided against it, because it doesn’t really finish or embrace certain characters or elements. They appear for a good chunk of the first half and begin to fade during the second. Even the fictional director (whom I’ll get to in a second) is commented about that.
Taking place in Spain, the 2004 setting is being written by a celebrated filmmaker named Raul Rossetti (Leonardo Sbaraglia from “Wild Tales” and “Pain and Glory”) in 2025. He believes making movies is his only source of life, and his next film is a passion project named “Bitter Christmas.” He tries not to exploit the issues of the people around him, which is why he changes names and their turmoil a bit. But he is caught between fiction and autofiction, which threatens to overlap one another.
His main heroine and alter ego is a filmmaker named Elsa (Barbara Lennie), who has only made commercials and two cult films and may be on the brink of a third feature. Before we get to that, we see her suffering from what starts off as a terrible migraine and ends up being a panic attack, being in love with her firefighter and stripper boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), and respectively helping her friends Natalia (Milena Smit from”Parallel Mothers”) and Patricia (Victoria Luengo from “The Room Next Door”) through different tragedies. Natalia lost her son in a car accident, while Patricia’s husband may have a fling in Paris (It’s a 2000s cell phone picture, so it’s a little blurry, but she can still tell by his jacket).
Back in the 2025 setting, Raul’s assistant Monica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón from “A Walk in the Clouds” and “Parallel Mothers”) resigns from her duties to help her friend deal with a tragedy. His screenplay gets threatened when she learns who one of his characters is based on. She’s mad at him, no matter how hard he tries to differentiate between the real character and the movie character.
As always in an Almadovar movie, the color palettes are superb. We see Elsa wearing sweaters in blue and then orange, and Raul looks good in a blue shirt, then red, and later in yellow. As he is typing on his computer, we get the end credits having different color rectangular shapes. The interior houses are painted in different colors. And the hospital has aqua chairs, and the walls are in aqua, red, white, and blue.
The performances from Lennie, Sbaraglia, and Sánchez-Gijón are brilliant, sharp, passionate, and often funny. All the qualities that make them ideal Almadovar characters. And there’s a strong sense regarding the developing of a screenplay, and whether or not names would be altered or exploited for entertainment purposes. There’s a distinction of the very notion that we’re able to acknowledge.
I was expecting to like “Bitter Christmas,” and where it was going, but the problem is how it handles the character development in the third act. At least, I think it’s third act if the film is going for that non-chronological order. For example, Patricia’s story doesn’t really justify itself as Natalia’s does, and as Monica comments on, Bonifacio has to get faded away. He starts off as Elsa’s lover and then he gets less and less character development. Break-ups do happen, but the movie acts like it wants to forget him.
There’s something brilliant inside this movie, but I’m not sure if it has an ending or endings.
In Select Theaters This Friday.
