Amarga Navidad / Bitter Christmas

 

Pedro Almodóvar: Amarga Navidad / Bitter Christmas (ES 2026). Leonardo Sbaraglia and Quim Gutiérrez.

Pedro Almodóvar: Amarga Navidad / Bitter Christmas (ES 2026). Vexierbild (picture puzzle): Leonardo Sbaraglia (Raúl) / Bárbara Lennie (Elsa).

IMDb capsule: "In 2004, an ad director faces a turbulent Christmas weekend. In 2026, a filmmaker turns her story into a screenplay, blurring the lines between reality, fiction, and the people closest to him."

The Finnish title differs from the original Amarga Navidad which means Bitter Christmas. The Finnish Autofiktio is more indicative of the movie's essence, its elusive character as multiple metafiction. It is a mobile hall of mirrors, also relevant in the context of a recent mighty account of modern and contemporary narrative prose: Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction.

Almodóvar's original title derives from a song by Chavela Vargas (1919-2012), a Mexican singer-songwriter-actress famous for her "rough voice of tenderness" in the genre of the ranchera. The sequence where Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) and Patricia (Victoria Luenge) sit on a sofa listening to a stunning late recording of Vargas singing "La llorona" ["The Crying Woman"] is an emotional high water mark, one of the most unforgettable scenes of its kind in the history of the cinema, evoking Fyodor Chalyapin's "Dvenadtsat razboinikov" (lyr. Nikolai Nekrasov, comp. Nikolai Manykin-Nevstruev) in Vasili Shukshin's Strange People. In both movies, the singer seems to interpret what the characters could not begin to articulate.

Autofiction takes us to deep sources. One of them is Nordic, in the cinema most famously an obsession of Ingmar Bergman's in a cycle of metafictions of his own, drawing from the legacy of August Strindberg. Fellini and Bergman are evoked in Almodóvar's film. Fellini called himself "a sincere liar" who draws on his life to tell stories. Bergman's approach in autofiction can be compared with Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit. You mine your life and transform it into poetry. Strindberg and Bergman were brutally honest and self-critical about the artist-vampire sucking the blood of people closest to him and transforming it into drama. This is also the great theme of Almodóvar in Amarga Navidad.

Visually, Bitter Christmas is sumptuous, a feast of colourism in a glorious scope frame. The interior design and the costume design are of the highest order. Presumably from his own art collection, Almodóvar highlights a painting from Asher Liftin's window series which brings a new insight to the movie's reflection on reality and illusion. It is a window of illusion.

Visually the most stunning scene is the opening at Lanzarote: an extreme high angle shot showing Elsa and Patricia on the black lava beach. In de luxe settings we follow suffering and Trauerarbeit among women - suffering from depression, panic disorder, loss of a child, separation and writer's block. On the other hand there are new emphases: the joy brought by the presence of a child, and the uninhibited female desire of the gorgeous stripper-firefighter Bonifacio (Patrick Criado).

Bitter Christmas is a film in search of its core, and the core is found in the finale. Raúl Rossetti (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is the male half in the protagonist duality. Both he and Elsa fight a writer's block with autofiction. Raúl's indispensable assistant, his right-hand person, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), is also the most honest reader of his scripts. This time Mónica says that Raúl is going too far. It is the greatest crisis in their collaboration. It is the last lesson. The end or perhaps a new beginning.

The lesson is about friendship. A true friend tells you the truth you don't want to hear.

Bitter Christmas is engrossing from the beginning to the end. It is a feast in mise-en-scène and colour design. The composition is a joy to the eye. I love the warm and tender colour play on the women's faces. The movie is a secular passion play with a powerful life-affirming current underneath. It is full of the joy of the cinema.

The concept of "a minor work" is evoked in the protagonists' agonizing around their writers' blocks, and Fellini and Bergman are mentioned in the context. Late in their careers the Italian and the Swede did turn minor work. Bitter Christmas? If this is a minor work, I look forward for more.

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Un film de Almodóvar

art credits

112 min

Loc: Madrid, Lanzarote.

Finnish / Swedish subtitles: Sari Selander / Micaela Palmberg.

Viewed at Finnkino Kinopalatsi 10, 29 Aug 2026