Bárbara Lennie

Noted Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is at heart an experimental filmmaker working in a narrative world, often seamlessly integrating his dual impulses with occasional bumps here and there (Parallel Mothers, 2021, a case in point.) However, in Amarga Navidad/Bitter Christmas, Almodóvar blends both appetites masterfully in a semi-autobiographical, nonchronological exploration of creativity. In it, to overcome his writer’s block, celebrated film director Raúl Rossetti (Leonardo Sbaraglia) borrows surreptitiously and invasively from closest friends’ lives in order to develop his future film’s screenplay, also titled Amarga Navidad/Bitter Christmas. Exploring the interplay between fictitious and derivative stories, Almodóvar presents parallel accounts, the actual events occurring over a long weekend in December 2004 in Madrid with Raúl’s assembled version written in the summer of 2026.