Almodóvar Calls 'Bitter Christmas' His Riskiest Film — SkimNews
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- "Bitter Christmas" opens during a summer heatwave despite its festive title, with Bárbara Lennie as autofictional director Elsa and Leonardo Sbaraglia as Raúl, the filmmaker writing her story — Almodóvar's 24th feature
- Almodóvar calls the metafiction "the riskiest film I've ever made," saying "80% of Raúl's dialogue is something I could say" and painting Raúl as "almost the villain" for plundering his assistant Mónica's life in his screenplay
- Netflix gets a jab when Raúl protests "Don't reduce me to making a TV movie!" — a stance Almodóvar held in 2017 as Cannes jury president, opposing Netflix films competing without French theatrical exhibition
- Will Smith, Almodóvar's 2017 Cannes juror, defended Netflix and showed "very bad taste as a person"; Almodóvar says Smith still "sounds like he is in a cult" after the 2022 Chris Rock slap, visible during Parallel Mothers' Oscar year
- The Last Dream, Almodóvar's story collection, contains the 2003 short story "Bitter Christmas" that inspired the film — an autofictional mirror of his own real-life panic attacks and migraines at the time
- Almodóvar says he would still have made Julieta (2016), his Alice Munro adaptation, even knowing the posthumous 2024 revelation that Munro stayed married to her husband after he sexually abused her daughter
Why it matters: A 76-year-old, two-time Oscar winner with 60-plus awards uses his most layered project to indict himself as a writer — Raúl is "almost the villain" — while squeezing in a re-fight of his 2017 Cannes stand against Netflix and a fresh reckoning with the Alice Munro scandal. The result is the most self-lacerating entry in Almodóvar's filmography, betting his arthouse base will follow him into a metafictional hall of mirrors.
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