Amarga Navidad (Bitter Christmas) by Pedro Almodóvar: Color switches sides
“When I am filming, I feel like a painter.” In Pedro Almodóvar’s work, color is not simply for decoration, it’s a language. In Amarga Navidad (Bitter Christmas), shown in Competition, the Spanish filmmaker uses his color palette as a power system. The characters’ clothes give away what they are concealing, and shades of fiction taint the shades of reality. A colorful reading of the artist’s ninth film presented in the Official Selection.
Amarga Navidad (Bitter Christmas) follows two parallel stories: one about Raúl Rossetti (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a screenwriter-director suffering from writer’s block, who takes inspiration for his next film from the life of Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), his assistant of twenty years; and the story of Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), also a director and Raúl’s fictional mirror image. Raúl sends his character to Lanzarote to grieve.
Raúl lives in a world bathed in mustard and gold tones. His sweaters, his home decor, the yellow light of his brutalist villa—everything points to a man who has constructed a world made to meet his own requirements. The color suggests self-sufficiency and seclusion, but then there’s his blue polo shirt (cold and clinical) on the day the screenwriter walks beside Mónica. Betrayal can be seen in his clothing before it’s revealed in his words, even before it enters Raúl’s consciousness.
Then comes the twist. Mónica arrives dressed in mustard yellow to settle the score. Raúl’s “shade,” his color, is being worn by the woman he has fictionalized without asking for permission. He is wearing a knitted black and gold polo shirt. The transition is a subtle one, but everything has flipped. Raúl believed he had turned Mónica into a character, but instead she is now throwing his own color back at him as a kind of rebuke.
In Lanzarote, the color palette shifts. The house where Elsa (Raúl’s fictional counterpart) comes to mourn (white, minimalist, designed in the style of César Manrique, who made Lanzarote his laboratory) offers a counterpoint to Madrid’s saturated tones. A white that breathes, that creates space. This is where Elsa rediscovers her love of writing, and it is also here, on the black lava, that Elsa’s scarlet dress, contrasting with Natalia’s (Milena Smit) black dress as she mourns her son, creates one of the film’s most striking images – two women, two ways of dealing with loss, opposed by color alone, without the need for a single word. This is the defining characteristic of autofiction: it changes the color of whatever it touches.
