Pain and Glory: Almodovar’s Personal Film, Starring Antonio Banderas as his Alter-Ego

Pedro Almodóvar directed Pain and Glory, a film starring Antonio Banderas as a gay Spanish filmmaker, Salvador Mallo, reflecting on his career and life on screen and off.

Almodóvar, 70, himself is a living auteur whose productions — many of them starring Banderas — have contributed immensely to LGBTQ global visibility.

Almodovar is the subject of my latest book:

Iconic Gay Directors. By Emanuel Levy (Columbia University Press).

Pain and Glory is the director’s most personal work yet, a reflection of a lifetime’s worth of love, heartbreak, and pain–both physical and mental.

It demonstrates the power of cinema to address personal and political crises — not to mention the complicated and necessary relationship between a director and an actor, and an artist and his muse.

The film is also notable for being one of Banderas’s finest performances to date, one that earned him his first Best Actor Oscar nomination.