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What happens to Antonio Banderas in “Pain and Glory”? A psychologist explains it to you
Analysis
The character is a successful film director who has known glory but is plunged into pain during an artistic and creative crisis.
Almodóvar’s latest film, “Pain and Glory”, has the same psychological burden as other productions by the La Mancha director. The filmmaker is already known for the harshness with which he treats the themes on which the stories of his films are based, and with his latest film, he has followed the same line. The film, which has won seven Goya awards and is nominated for best international film at the Oscars, delves into the life, soul and body of Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), a successful film director who has known glory, but that is submerged in pain during an artistic and creative crisis, that is magnificent in a vital crisis, caused by a series of physical pains that prevent him from continuing with his profession. The film, which has become a tasting menu for the world of psychology, has been analyzed by Rafael San Román, a psychologist at the ifeel app.
«I began to know my body through pain and illness. I soon discovered that my head and what was inside it, in addition to being a source of pleasure and knowledge, contained infinite possibilities of pain ”, boasts the character played by Antonio Banderas in a sequence. Undoubtedly, the sensitive content on the capacities of the human being in terms of the management of emotions glimpses by itself.
The story of Pain and Glory is the story of how Salvador Mallo faces the significant losses of his life, a series of important duels that he has to face trapped in a body that does not accompany him. We see it installed in the powerful oscillation that characterizes any normal duel. On the one hand, you need to furiously disconnect from the reality of your losses, anesthetizing yourself by all means. On the other hand, he allows himself to connect with that same reality and try to solve the tasks that remain pending.
Visit the past of a life
“Any important grieving process takes time and Salvador Mallo knows it better than anyone. To travel it we see it revisit symbolic places of your relationships from the point of view of today. Not walking in circles in an unproductive way, but coming back to dig deeper each visit, as happens with normal duels, ”says Rafael San Román.
Observed with the eyes of a psychologist, Mallo reviews his life by pulling his coping style. This style is very characterized by the narrative: he is a writer, a film director who has lost. He has lost an important partner, his mother, his pillar, and health over the years. Mallo tries to rebuild from inside his cage a self-concept that screams in despair.
Here, the strategies to face this pain and prevent it from becoming a prison are especially relevant. Any sudden or chronic life crisis requires our body to start its coping style. This style, forged since we are very young -even babies- is specified in a repertoire of strategies that we put in place to deal with the various problems that appear throughout our biographies.
Confrontation strategies
The coping strategies of a human being can be basically divided into four types: cognitive, emotional, somatic and behavioral. “In the end it all comes down to what you think, what you feel, what is stirred in your body and the things you do,” says San Román. The distinction between coping strategies Mental, emotional, somatic and behavioral are done only with a didactic objective.
“Salvador Mallo has a fat crisis on his hands so, how could it be otherwise, he has to pull the tools he has at hand (that is, coping strategies) to survive”, adds psychologist Rafael San Román .
In Salvador Mallo behavioral coping strategies are recognized, such as the use he makes of his medication as well as drugs, which show a clear switch-off function. They are powerful anesthetics and sleeping pills that help you escape your pain.
Other behavioral coping strategies of this character would be, for example, take care of your health by going to the doctor and undergoing tests and treatments of various kinds with the expectation of feeling better. On the other hand, unleashing your creativity through writing or filming movies would be a behavioral strategy with a significant cognitive component as well. The function of writing, of expressing his inner world in different formats, would have in Mallo a function above all of connection, of tolerating his pain and looking at him from the front, without running away, without anesthesia.
“Normal grief is like a pendulum in which it is as important to connect with the reality of loss as it is to disconnect from it,” concludes San Román.