A Copy of a Copy of a Copy: Bitter Christmas

As a cinephile who became aware of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar when Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown took the international film world by storm in 1988, I found it unsettling to be surrounded by college kids while watching the septuagenarian auteur’s latest feature, Bitter Christmas, which toggles between the present and 2004. (Having missed its spring premiere at Cannes, I instead caught it in October at the less glitzy but more accessible SCAD Savannah Film Festival, the world’s largest university-run film fest.) Indeed, a scene-stealing cameo by an older, less angular, but still undeniably recognizable Rossy de Palma, one of the original Almodóvar muses, elicited no reaction from the Gen Z audience. For these multiplatform natives, Almodóvar means Penélope Cruz in the serious 2021 drama Parallel Mothers, not Victoria Abril in the subversive 1990 rom-com Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

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