Bitter Christmas review – grief, loss and artistic betrayal in Almodóvar’s film within a film

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Cannes film festival: Spaniard’s latest life-v-art auto-metafiction feels slightly muddled as he directs a director directing a director With its rich, warm, summery colours, nothing could surely be less bitter or less Christmassy than this film. It’s the latest from Cannes competition regular Pedro Almodóvar, partly set during Christmas; the female lead actually complains about the yuletide traffic at one stage. But there’s no tinsel or sleigh bells or shopping for presents. Like Die Hard, it eludes classification. It is another – which is to say, yet another – double-layered creation by Almodóvar, a kind of movie auto-metafiction of the sort that he has virtually invented, a life-v-art dialectical process that he is evidently unable to do without. Like the recent Pain and Glory , Bitter Christmas is a candidly personal movie, circling around ideas like grief, loss, the vampirism of art and the betrayal involved in basing fictional characters on real people. Perhaps by emphasising thi...
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Electric Malady review – life under a blanket for man who fears ‘electrosenstivity’

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This tactful documentary follows William, living in a tinfoil-covered cabin and covered in a blanket. But is there anything behind his condition?

William lives in a pretty wooden cabin deep in a Swedish forest. It looks like any other cabin, except William has covered it with aluminium mosquito netting. Inside, his bedroom is like a silver cave: walls and floor are lined with industrial-looking tinfoil bubble wrap. And then there is William himself – covered from head to toe in a white blanket. He looks like a kid dressed up as a ghost for Halloween. Except there are no cutouts for his eyes: holes would let in the electromagnetic radiation. So William lives mostly in darkness.

This idea that modern life could be making us ill, that there might be health dangers caused by exposure to electromagnetic fields given off by mobile phones and wifi technology, was big in the 00s. The mainstream media took it semi-seriously. Panorama even did a wifi special episode in 2007, which the BBC’s own complaints unit criticised for being misleading. The issue has since dropped off the radar but there are still people who believe that they are suffering from electrosensitivity.

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