SUMMONING THE GHOSTS OF THE PAST - A KALEIDOSCOPE OF MEMORIES IN THE MOVIE PAIN AND GLORY (2019)

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the movie titled Pain and Glory, filmed in 2019 by the famous Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. According to Labarthe (2022), this is both his most personal and intimate work. The plot follows the story of a film director and screenwriter who reminisces about his life, his temptations, and expectations after achieving success and fame. For the purposes of this paper, we understand the movie as a text that is based on a script, and in our analysis, we are paying particular attention to the flashbacks. A flashback represents a technique of placing the action into the past, as, for instance, in this Almodovar’s movie, the main character reconstructs his life through episodes from different life periods. We find that the most frequent flashbacks are from the period of Salvador's childhood, that is, the period of fifty years prior to the main plot’s timeline. Apart from the flashbacks and memories, we also find the characters revisiting the past dialogically, i.e., in a conversational form. The pain to which the title of the film alludes is both physical and mental, demonstrating that fame is inevitably accompanied by pain. Since we find correspondence between the real life of the director himself and the life of the main character, we also analyze the examples of autofiction in this movie. Furthermore, Almodovar's universe explores the relationship between a mother and a son, while the father is barely mentioned. With this film, Almodovar erases the boundaries between reality and fiction and rewrites them. Always on the edge of the truth, the director comments that the described events are fictitious, consistent with the context, though their occurrence seems plausible.