Bitter Christmas

Split across two distinct timelines, this really quite messy and often almost incoherent drama tells us the story of the migraine-prone "Elsa" (Bárbara Lennie) as she recovers from the death of her mother - after a lingering illness - in 2004. She heads to the calm of the black-sanded Lanzarote to rejuvenate her writing career with her troubled friend "Natalia" (Milena Smit) whilst abandoning her hunky fireman/stripper boyfriend "Beau" (Patrick Criado) at home in Madrid. The later timeline introduces us to filmmaker "Raúl" (Leonardo Sbaraglia) who is putting the finishing touches to a screeenplay that bears a striking rememblance to the life of "Elsa" - a fact that shocks his hitherto loyal assistant "Mónica" (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) who had recently resigned to go and take care of a sister dealing with a trauma of her own, and that seems to confuse his loving boyfriend "Santi" (Quim Gutiérrez) whose criticism of his work are rarely controversial. What's clear from the latter sequence of events is that "Raúl" is struggling to innovate his script and so is - perhaps subconsciously, perhaps not - relying on his own and other's real life experiences to craft his opus and that his determination to complete it may be clouding his judgement and certainly risking his relationships. How is he going to address this dilemma and is "Elsa" ever going to emerge from her self-imposed island exile? Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for this, but there seemed to be gaps - and lots of them - that not only made following the nuances of the plot quite difficult but also meant that for much of the film there just wasn't much by way of cohesion amidst a collection of largely undercooked characterisations. We are left to make just one too many assumptions about the links between the characters until auteur Almodóvar decides to read us into something that makes a little more sense, but by that point I had rather lost interest. We dart between the scenarios easily enough, but the plot is further complicated by partial flashbacks and by what passes for it's conclusion I felt that the degree of almost forensic attention required to make much from this didn't really pay off. There was only one other person in the cinema for this screening and I left wondering if perhaps this director's bubble might have burst? His imagination here lacks the sharpness and controversial subtexts that I have long enjoyed and verges all too closely on the melodramatic - and nobody here on or behind the screen really sets anything alight. Criado does a decent striptease, though...!