The pain and glory of ageing
Cinematic reflection on ageing is often about the extremes of life, such as in Pixar's Up, The Company of Strangers by Cynthia Scott, and Michael Haneke's Amour. But the transition from middle age to early old age is also a key time for reflection, recalibration, and refocus of the meaning of life and reconciliation of suffering, mistakes, and successes.
These themes feature in the latest film by Pedro Almodóvar. Pain and Glory is his 21st creation, and cleaves more closely than all of his works to the axiom that all fiction is autobiographical. As the director nears the age of 70 years, his screen alter-ego Salvador Mallo sets the scene with an extended catalogue of his medical woes, encompassing severe back pain, tinnitus, headaches, insomnia, and dysphagia caused by Forestier's disease. Played with remarkable restraint and skill by Antonio Banderas, this list of physical pains is a cinematic rendering of the dictum of vascular surgeon René Leriche that health is the silence of the organs.
Narrated through a series of flashbacks that reflect his life and are interweaved with references to Almodóvar's earlier movies, Salvador seems trapped in a web of pain and creative doldrums while also grieving for his mother. Yet the skilful interweaving of past and present gives a simultaneous and subliminal powerful counter-message of vitality—which of the Almodóvars are we watching? It is this ability to reconcile paradox that is one of the great gifts of later life. We begin to recognise that Salvador's pain is as much psychological as physical but that it is also a source and engine of his being and creativity. In addition, his personal transformation is a cinematic parallel of the radical change of Spain from its rigid past under Franco to a freer, more diverse but no less complicated society.
A revival of one of his early movies reconnects Salvador with its star, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), from whom he had been estranged due to artistic and personal differences during filming. In their awkward reunion, the under-employed and dissolute Alberto gets Salvador to smoke heroin, which fuels vivid memories of his relationship with his mother, a captivating Penélope Cruz in the childhood scenes. A strong woman who protects and nurtures him in an impoverished environment, his mother is also challenged by his emerging sexuality. The narrative about their relationship crystallises the recognition and uneasy coming to terms with the universal sorrows of having not lived up to our finest selves in important relationships during life.
Alberto discovers a love story on Salvador's computer that he adapts to a one-man theatre show. This in turn sparks an encounter that renews contact between Salvador with the subject of the romance, Federico, now married to a woman and father of children, and fuels reminiscence of the origins of Salvador's early sexual awareness. These recollections highlight the potent retention of romantic and erotic memory when many other aspects of memory begin to falter—an aspect of ageing that is rarely discussed in gerontology but which can be vividly brought to life through cinema. A wider appreciation of older people's inner treasury of romantic and intimate sexual experiences might serve as a potent portal to a fuller and richer vision of later life for health-care professionals who engage with older people.
Inevitably suffused with life's contradictions and uncertainties, such memories are at the heart of the wonders of being human but also are enhanced by the gift of being able to use maturity and longevity to appreciate and make sense of life. This recognition is echoed in the final coup de théâtre, a marvellous testament to the opportunities we can gain from embracing the pain and glory of our ageing selves.
Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria) Directed by Pedro Almodóvar, El Deseo/Pathe, 2019 http://www.pathe.co.uk/news/pain-and-glory/
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