‘Pain and Glory’: Banderas Carries Almodóvar’s Portrait of a Man Who Can’t Stop Remembering

Salvador Mallo is a filmmaker who cannot stop remembering. Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory is a film about memory, addiction, and the strange bond between art and life, told through the eyes of a man who has stopped making movies entirely. Antonio Banderas plays Salvador, a writer-director in the twilight of his career, whose back pain, headaches, and dysphagia keep him from working. The movie follows him as he revisits his past — a childhood in a cave-house in Paterna, a lover who used heroin, a priestly education he never wanted — and wonders if telling those stories aloud might save him.

The film opens in Madrid, where Salvador lives alone and rarely leaves his apartment. His health has forced him into a kind of confinement, and his mind fills the space with images of the people he left behind. The tagline — “Pain, Glory, Love, Art, Cinema” — names the five things the film keeps circling back to, and Almodóvar never lets the order slip. The story moves between three periods: the sixties in the village, the eighties in Madrid, and the present, where Salvador faces his mortality and the impossibility of separating his own life from the fiction he once created.

Trailer, via Sony Pictures Classics.

The Three Timelines

Salvador’s memories are not linear. They arrive as fragments, triggered by taste, touch, and old friends who call or knock on his door. The film jumps between a boy teaching a man to read in exchange for work in the cave, a young man who becomes his first lover, and a later relationship with Federico, a man whose heroin use tore them apart. Each of these stories is a wound that Salvador has carried, and each is tied to a specific person who appears in the film as a ghost or a visitor.

Alberto Crespo, played by Asier Etxeandia, is the central figure in Salvador’s past. They were the lead actors in Salvador’s old film Flavor, and they fell out when Alberto became addicted to heroin during filming. When Salvador reaches out to Alberto to ask him to present Flavor at a screening, the meeting brings back the anger and the tenderness both men felt toward each other. Under the influence of heroin together, Salvador remembers moving into the cave-house with his impoverished parents as a child, and the shame he felt at being separated from them to attend a seminary.

The Cast

Banderas gives a career-best performance as Salvador, a man who is physically broken and emotionally raw. His face registers the weight of every memory, and his delivery of lines about loss and regret feels genuine rather than theatrical. Asier Etxeandia is equally strong as Alberto, a man who has spent years trying to outrun the demons that ruined his life. The chemistry between the two actors is the engine of the film, and their scenes together — from the screening to the shared high — carry the emotional center of the story.

Penélope Cruz appears as Jacinta, a pious woman from Paterna who shows up unannounced and speaks in riddles about faith and fate. Her presence is unsettling, and her dialogue about Salvador’s destiny adds a layer of dread to the film’s final act. Leonardo Sbaraglia plays Federico, the man whose heroin use destroyed Salvador’s second relationship, and he brings a quiet desperation to a character who has lost everything. Nora Navas plays Mercedes, and Julieta Serrano plays Old Jacinta, both giving grounded performances in smaller roles.

The Festival Run

Pain and Glory made its international debut at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d’Or and won two awards: Banderas for Best Actor and Alberto Iglesias for Best Soundtrack. The film’s reception at Cannes set the tone for its broader release, and the recognition for both Banderas and the score helped draw attention to a project that was already generating buzz for its personal stakes.

At the 92nd Academy Awards, Pain and Glory was nominated for Best International Feature Film, and Banderas was nominated for Best Actor. The Oscar nods placed the film among the year’s most celebrated foreign-language releases, and they added to the critical weight that had built up around the Cannes win.

The Weight of Memory

What makes Pain and Glory work is its refusal to tidy up Salvador’s story. The film ends with a question rather than an answer, leaving Salvador at a crossroads, deciding whether to let the past define him or to break free from it.

There is a moment near the end where Salvador looks at a photograph of himself as a child and sees the distance between who he was and who he is now. That distance is the film’s central tension, and it never fully closes.

The film also leans heavily on its visual style, with saturated colors, tight close-ups, and a sense of intimacy that makes the screen feel like a private diary. The cinematography, along with Alberto Iglesias’s score, creates a world that is both vivid and claustrophobic. The sound design amplifies the physicality of Salvador’s pain, making every cough and ache feel present in the room.

The Final Verdict

Pain and Glory is a masterful portrait of a man who has lost the ability to create and is trying to find it again through memory. Almodóvar’s direction is precise, Banderas’s performance is devastating, and the film’s handling of addiction, grief, and creativity is honest and compassionate. It is a demanding watch, full of pain and glory in equal measure, and it rewards patience with a deeply human story about what we hold onto and what we let go.

The film’s structure — the three timelines of the sixties, the eighties, and the present — mirrors the shape of Salvador’s inner life. Each period carries its own emotional charge, and the film does not resolve them into a neat arc. Instead, it leaves Salvador at a crossroads, deciding whether to let the past define him or to break free from it.

Here is how the film’s timeline breaks down:

1. The sixties: the village, the cave-house, the move into Paterna.
2. The eighties: Madrid, the rise of Salvador’s career, the relationship with Federico.
3. The present: Madrid, Salvador’s illness, the screening of Flavor.

Each period is rendered with its own palette and its own emotional weight, and the film shifts between them without losing the thread of Salvador’s inner journey.

Key Facts
– Director: Pedro Almodóvar
– Written by: Pedro Almodóvar
– Runtime: 114 minutes
– Genre: Drama
– Tagline: “Pain, Glory, Love, Art, Cinema”

The film’s handling of memory is its core strength. Salvador’s recollections are not presented as a simple flashback. They are fragmented, associative, and often tinged with regret. The film captures the way memory works in real life — messy, selective, and colored by the present.

The film’s final stretch is its most ambitious. Salvador is forced to confront the people from his past, including Jacinta, who arrives unannounced and speaks in riddles about faith and fate. These encounters push him toward a decision about whether to continue living or to accept the end of his creative life.

Pain and Glory is a demanding watch, but it is a rewarding one. It is a film about the fragility of memory and the stubbornness of art, and it finds both in the same man. The film’s ending is not a resolution, but it is a fitting one for a man who has spent his life turning memory into art and art into memory.

Almodóvar · Banderas · drama · movie review · Oscar Nominee