Pedro Almodóvar’s 2019 drama Pain and Glory is a late-career knockout that’s among the great Spanish iconoclast’s most introspective, emotionally candid work. It casts a never-better Antonio Banderas as a surrogate for the director, exploring creativity, physical suffering, addiction and memory with startling vulnerability and poignancy that stings. In Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad), Almodóvar again draws from a highly personal well, but this time dilutes the pathos by splitting his proxy in two — a director wrestling with a script and the fictional filmmaker intended to be its subject.

A return to Spanish-language cinema after his first feature in English, The Room Next Door, Almodóvar’s new movie is a customarily elegant exercise. It’s intricately structured over two timelines two decades apart that fit together like a puzzle; beautifully acted by a cast of both regulars and newcomers; dripping in visual style; and surging with intense melodrama, enveloped in a sumptuously turbulent score by the director’s indispensable longtime composer Alberto Iglesias. 

Perhaps fittingly, however, given the frequent appearance onscreen of text in bold red letters, much of it to be deleted or rewritten, the material sometimes seems stuck to the page. The feeling emerges that while it presumably is cathartic for Almodóvar, an artist reflecting on his work and its emotional cost — to the people closest to him even more than himself — it stays somewhat at a distance for the audience, compelling but seldom affecting.

For many of us, even mid-tier Almodóvar is superior to a lot of filmmakers’ peak work, so there are always going to be rewards. In this case, one of the biggest is Antxón Gómez’s aesthetically intoxicating production design (there’s not a single home in this film I wouldn’t kill to live in). Together with Paco Delgado’s stylish costumes, the splashes of eye-popping color and eccentric décor hint at sides the characters tend to keep hidden. 

There’s also understated humor and even an extended display of glistening male pulchritude that seem like winking signals from an auteur whose appetite for pleasure has not been extinguished by the anxieties clearly plaguing him. But despite moments of fun, Bitter Christmas is a downbeat film. 

It feels confessional in its portrait of a director fearing that his creative tank is running low on ideas and interrogating himself about an artist’s right to feed off the troubles of his friends, like a trauma vampire. But that internal conflict doesn’t offer much for the audience to latch onto, though that’s no fault of Leonardo Sbaraglia, the charismatic Argentinian actor playing Almodóvar’s immediate stand-in, Raúl.

Sbaraglia brings warmth and empathy to a double-edged character who gives off an air of practiced contentment but has sealed himself off in a bubble. He lives in an airy villa flanked by a Hockney-esque swimming pool where his devoted younger partner, Santi (Quim Gutiérrez), swims laps, though his main confidante is his friend and longtime assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). She routinely reels off a list of invites to accept honorary awards at international film festivals, sometimes with a generous fee attached, all of which Raúl routinely declines.

The protagonist of his screenplay, set in 2004, is Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), who rolls her eyes at being called a “cult director,” quickly clarifying that she made two unsuccessful movies that have a small but ardent fanbase and now directs commercials. An early scene in which Elsa and her devoted younger partner Beau (Patrick Criado) explain what a cult director is to a curious hospital doctor (delightful Carmen Machi) is a welcome shot of humor.

The doctor recognizes Elsa but also hunky Beau, the latter from his slutty routine at a bachelorette party. Beau, whose real name is Bonifacio, is a fireman who sidelines as a stripper — Almodóvar treats us to a full performance at the club where he works, driving a bridal party to paroxysms of squealing excitement as he sheds clothes and gyrates to Grace Jones singing “I’ve Seen That Face Before.” The act that follows Beau strips to the Amanda Lear disco banger “Run Baby Run,” leaving no doubt that this is still very much an Almodóvar joint. The melodrama at times bleeds into moroseness, but it’s great to see he hasn’t forsaken his flair for retro camp.

Like Raúl, and Almodóvar before him, Elsa is still mourning the loss of her mother. She suffers from acute migraines and panic attacks, and Beau could not be more attentive to her care. In one lovely interlude he takes her to the swanky home of her friend Gabriela, played by Rossy de Palma, a glorious callback to vintage Almodóvar. Like a madrileña Auntie Mame, Gabriela is busy hosting what seems like one of an endless series of fabulous parties, but she pauses long enough to give Elsa half her stash of heavy-duty prescription painkillers and insist that she rest in a quiet bedroom while they take effect. 

A favorite Almodóvarian muse is the late Mexican singer Chavela Vargas, whose raw rancheras have often been used in his work to heighten emotions. (The movie takes its title from one of them.) That happens twice here — first when a party guest (popular singer Amaia Romero) visits Elsa in Gabriela’s bedroom, crooning “Las Simples Cosas” (“Love is simple / And the simple things are devoured by time”); and soon after when Elsa visits her friend Patrizia (Victoria Luengo), who plays a raspy late-in-life Chavela performance of “La Llorona” on the stereo.

But the ravishing melancholy of those rancheras doesn’t correspond to a similar depth of feeling in the narrative(s). A change of setting when Elsa takes Patrizia to stay in a luxury rental on the volcanic island of Lanzarote brings different visual textures — DP Pau Esteve Birba takes full advantage of the black lava fields patterned by the wind — but the movie’s parallel-plotline scheme becomes more mechanical as Elsa, too, starts working on a screenplay.

One of the better scenes happens when Patrizia, who believes her husband is cheating on her, bristles at being used as fodder for Elsa’s script. Even more so when Elsa gives a scorching assessment of her marriage. Patrizia’s angry departure makes way for the arrival of Natalia (Milena Smit), another depressed friend who retreated to her childhood pueblo with her mother following a devastating loss.

Almodóvar and editor Teresa Font handle the transitions between the two time periods with graceful fluidity. But the overlap between life and art yields a disappointingly muted payoff. That’s despite invigorating fireworks when Mónica — after leaving to care for her ailing partner, Elena, taking a draft of Raúl’s screenplay with her to read — returns enraged by his insensitivity.

Mónica lets him have it for using Elena’s tragic circumstances as dramatic fuel. He responds defensively, insisting it’s pure fiction and that she’s overreacting, which triggers her to eviscerate him over the laziness behind his creative crisis. She even lashes into him about Santi, of whom she feels protective, while Raúl treats him the same way Elsa treats Beau — as a person with no identity beyond that of adoring companion.

Sánchez-Gijón (along with Smit, a standout in Parallel Mothers) is magnificent in these fierce scenes, which ripple with the blunt honesty of a director reassessing some of the work that made him famous. But Bitter Christmas feels like a tortured analysis construct, in which Almodóvar — normally the most generous of artists — is working things out in his own head rather than coaxing his audience in to share the experience.