In Exile

PAIN AND GLORY (B) - Pedro Almodovar returns with this late-in-life meditation on a constipated creative process.  Antonio Banderas is wonderfully grizzled and weary as Salvador Mallo, the writer-director's altar ego.  Mallo is suffering physically (serious back pain, headaches) and mentally as he drifts along in limbo.

Almodovar uses flashbacks to childhood to connect, literally, with his inner child, and it would not be an Almodovar film if we didn't get wistful scenes with his mother, played here in gauzy memory moments by Penelope Cruz, lovely and luscious, as always. Salvador also recalls the hunky teen handyman who seems to have sparked both his sexuality and creativity.  Back in the present, an old flame looks up Salvador after seeing a stage revival of one of his works, and they share a tender moment.  Meantime, another old comrade gets Salvador to trade up from his prescription opiods to heroin.  And here's where "Pain and Glory" drags. It traffics in just one too many tropes -- mommy issues, stifled artistic expression, childhood sexualization, and junkie behavior.

Banderas virtually sleepwalks through this, seemingly oblivious to the colors and resonant images that Almodovar surrounds him with. It's all an alluring package, but like Salvador during most of this film, it feels hollow on the inside.

SYNONYMS (B) - This in-your-face screed follows Yoav (newcomer Tom Mercier), a damaged former Israeli soldier searching for comfort in Paris, renouncing everything that preceded his self-imposed exile. Upon his arrival, he is robbed of his backpack and clothes, left naked in a bathtub, symbolizing a literal rebirth. He is discovered by a neighboring couple, Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who both are instantly drawn to Yoav's animal magnetism.

But Yoav is a wild, unpredictable stallion. He stalks the streets of Paris, his mind racing with French translations, often a string of synonyms, which gives us the film's title. The camerawork is jumpy and overly intimate, as if the camera operator elbowed the Dardenne brothers out of the way to get even closer over the shoulder of the subject. Throughout, Yoav is barely suppressing a rage that he gives occasional flashes of in his interactions with others.

Written and directed by Nadav Lapid (with Haim Lapid), who gave us the original version of the disturbing "Kindergarten Teacher," this one is a challenge, due to the prismatic narrative and the fuming of Yoav. Halfway through, you might wonder what the point is. And then Lapid doubles down on Yoav's degradation and PTSD, as when Yoav humiliates himself for a porn photographer who keys in on the auto-anti-semitism. (Mercier, from the start, displays his goods in full-frontal nudity, an apt example of his truly raw performance.)

Lapid ends things with a scene of Yoav trying to break down a locked door. It's an obvious metaphor that bookends the bathtub birth. Does this story add up? Hard to say. It's haunting, nonetheless.

BONUS TRACKS
"Synonyms" has an alluring soundtrack. There's this, Ernie K.. Doe's "Here Come the Girls":



And in a flashback, soldier Yoav destroys a target with machine-gun fire to the balletic lilt of Pink Martini's "Je ne Veux pas Travailler":