Apparatus Theory: PAIN & GLORY (2019)

It’s your eyes that have changed, darling. The film is the same.

In the wake of his film being restored, Spanish director Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) reunites with an actor from decades past (Asier Etxeandia), prompting a life-altering reflection on his childhood. As he secretly takes heroin to dull his chronic pain, Salvador conjures images of his mother (Penélope Cruz) and their cave-home in Paterna. Modelled on Almodóvar’s own upbringing, Pain and Glory and the character of Salvador — his cipher — loosen space-time in order to better understand filmmaking as an intervention into the past. As ever, Almodóvar is attentive to the tenuous relationship between making and exhibiting films, as well as the cinema of the body: medical imaging, sexual awakenings, bodily memory. This reflexive life story is constructed with patience, rigour, and humour, asking us if there is, in fact, a difference between living life and building narrative.  (SAFFRON MAEVE)