Almodovar arrives with twelve Vargas songs, Belgrade opens the evening

Toward the end of the first part of Bitter Christmas, Elsa, played by Barbara Lennie, walks into the empty house of her mother shortly after the funeral and sits down at the kitchen table where a bowl of uneaten soup is still standing. The scene runs two minutes without a single word, while the sound of the Atlantic’s waves drifts through the window, because the house is on Lanzarote. At Cannes that scene was the cause of ten-minute ovations, but also the reason some French critics wrote that Almodovar has finally started making the film his whole previous career had promised. Others, no less serious, wrote that this is a film in which one sees a director who has worked the same theme for forty years, and now finally arrived at it.

The Serbian premiere of Bitter Christmas is tonight at 8 p.m. at the MTS Hall, the first Belgrade screening as part of the regular distribution MCF MegaCom Film handles for Serbia. Before the screening, the Mexican singer Karla Cardenal will perform several Chavela Vargas songs, among them Amarga Navidad, after which the film takes its title. Vargas, who died in 2012, was for decades Almodovar’s close collaborator, and her music appears in almost every one of his films from Real Life in 1995 onwards. This time her voices are not just part of the soundtrack: the film’s narrative mentions that the central character Elsa, who is a director, has shot a documentary about the singer, and it is precisely that footage that runs through her memories.

Almodovar with this film returns to the Spanish language after his first English-language feature, The Room Next Door, which won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2024. It was shot in Madrid and on Lanzarote, with Barbara Lennie and Leonardo Sbaraglia in the leads, and in supporting roles Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, Milena Smit, Kim Gutierrez and Rossy de Palma. It is the seventeenth feature by the most famous living Spanish director, who was at this year’s Cannes one of only two authors with already confirmed places in the festival’s history (the other was Almodovar’s contemporary Aki Kaurismaki, whose film ultimately left without an award).

The theme of dying in several directions

The narrative of Bitter Christmas begins with Elsa’s mother’s funeral and her decision, against medical advice for psychological rest, to continue work on her documentary. The producer nevertheless insists on a pause, so Elsa travels to Lanzarote with her friend Patricia, whose marriage has recently broken up over her husband’s infidelity. What follows is a film about two women in their late forties trying to step out of others’ expectations in a space that belongs to neither of them. Lanzarote, with its volcanic black soil and white houses, is for Almodovar not just a landscape but becomes a third protagonist, with a visual plan that directly quotes the lexicon of his 1990s films, above all The Flower of My Secret.

At Cannes some critics described this as Almodovar’s most self-referential work to date, because the protagonist Elsa is not just a director, the dialogue also mentions her earlier films that resemble Almodovar’s. That meta-textual play, in which a director speaks of himself through a fictional director, may be what produced both the ovations and one strand of objection about excess mannerism in the Cannes hall. Almodovar is an authorial signature to the level where even an average viewer recognises in his films the light, the colour palette, the way the camera descends. The question is whether such work at 75 is authorial consistency or creative inertia. Reviews vary: Variety called the film self-referential, Hollywood Reporter wrote of the warm Cannes reception.

For the Belgrade premiere it is also notable that the MTS Hall was chosen as the screening venue instead of the multiplex cinemas. The hall, which normally serves musical concerts and television broadcasts, has the acoustic potential for Karla Cardenal’s performance, no minor consideration for the organisers. After the premiere, the film enters regular distribution across the country on 28 May and will be shown at Cineplexx Usce, Cineplexx Big and several cinemas outside Belgrade. Almodovar’s latest deserves to be seen in a hall where Vargas can be heard live, an experience that will rarely repeat, if ever again. I believe this film requires a patient gaze and is not for those who look to Almodovar for the melodramatic explosivity of the early nineties.