Pedro Almodóvar’s Amagra Navidad (Bitter Christmas), the first film from the Spanish master since he won the Golden Lion at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, received a warm response from its premiere in competition at Cannes. The melodrama marks the 76-year-old director’s return to his native language after making his English-language debut with the Venice-winning The Room Next Door, which featured Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton as estranged friends brought back together for an assisted suicide.
In contrast to that film’s 17-minute standing ovation, with Almodóvar running up and down the aisles, the six-and-a-half-minute standing ovation from the audience in the Grand Thêatre Lumière seemed positively staid.
The gala premiere itself was one of the starriest audiences of this festival, with Juliette Binoche sitting in the row in front of the cast and crew, ready to give Almodóvar a hug as soon as he walked in. Also walking the carpet to huge applause was 89-year-old, two-time Palme d’Or winner Ken Loach.
Representing younger generations of directors were Darren Aronofsky and Jordan Firstman, who may be the biggest star of Cannes, after A24’s $17 million purchase, following a bidding war, of his feature directorial debut, Club Kid. Model Helena Christensen turned heads as did Club Kid heartthrob Diego Calva. Dita Von Teese and James King also came to pay their respects, as did longtime Almodóvar collaborator Rossy de Palma.
When handed a microphone during the ovation, Almodóvar seemed visibly touched. “This is so moving that I have no words. It’s beyond words,” he said. “I remember all of the projections and schemings that I have in this place and I have to say, I’ve never found an audience [as warm] as when I’m here … This is really a dream for me and I will miss it very much when I will not come.”
Almodóvar received several minutes of applause before even sitting down, a tribute to his long history with this festival and the love for him in the film world. Bitter Christmas is ultimately about artists who’ve lost their way and are trying to find themselves, which feels like a not-so-subtle exploration of how Almodóvar feels at this late stage of his career.
It’s all beautifully shot, with Almodóvar’s signature vibrant color palette and incredible set design. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney describes it as “beautifully acted by a cast of both regulars and newcomers; dripping in visual style; and surging with intense melodrama, enveloped in a sumptuously turbulent score by the director’s indispensable longtime composer Alberto Iglesias.”
Industry jokes got the biggest laughs, such as when Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) tells a doctor that she’s considered a “cult” filmmaker because not many people had much interest in watch her movies but a few people really liked them. (The doctor had thought it meant she was leading a religious sect.) Later on, during an argument, Raúl’s closes confidant tells him, “Netflix has been waiting for you your entire life!” — clearly, in Almodóvar’s mind, the most cutting insult anyone can give a screenwriter. The audience roared with laughter.
The heart of the movie might be the set piece in which Mexican singer Chavela Vargas sings a folk song about La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman, the subject of various ghost stories in which she wanders the banks of rivers hunting for children to replace hers who died. Almodóvar lets the entire song play out, as Elsa and her boyfriend weep. When Vargas concluded, the Cannes audience applauded mid-movie. It felt in some ways symbolic — a gesture of thanks for one great moment in an Almodóvar movie, in a career that we all hope still has more of those moments to come.
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