‘Bitter Christmas’ feels at times like Pedro Almodóvar coasting along with another variation on themes that have fascinated him throughout his career: filmmaking, memory, desire, identity and the slippery boundary between reality and fiction. There is plenty here that is recognizably Almodóvar, but I wasn’t always convinced that the various layers completely cohere. Perhaps appropriately for a film about a writer constructing and reconstructing a screenplay, there are moments when we seem to be watching Almodóvar thinking aloud.

The film initially appears to be set in 2004, where we follow Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a filmmaker and commercials director whose life becomes increasingly complicated over the Christmas period. She suffers from migraines and moves through a network of relationships that gradually begins to feel slightly artificial.

Then we realize why.

The characters we have been watching aren’t necessarily autonomous characters at all. Like something out of ‘Stranger Than Fiction’, they are creations within somebody else’s screenplay. What initially appears to be reality is actually fiction being constructed by a filmmaker in the present day, drawing upon people he has known and experiences from his own life.

That immediately raises the film’s most interesting question: what responsibility does a writer have towards the real people he turns into fiction?

Most writers inevitably borrow something from life. A gesture, conversation, relationship or personality may find its way into a novel or screenplay, sometimes consciously and sometimes without the writer even realizing it. But what happens when somebody recognizes themselves? At what point does artistic licence become exploitation?

Almodóvar plays with that boundary throughout ‘Bitter Christmas’. The filmmaker’s contemporary experiences begin influencing the screenplay he is writing about events twenty years earlier. People from his present life are transformed into characters from the past, and sometimes the process seems almost comically unimaginative. He may simply alter a name – Elsa becomes Natalia, for example – while retaining characteristics which make the real-world inspiration fairly obvious.

There is something wonderfully cheeky about a filmmaker of Almodóvar’s stature making a film which effectively asks whether filmmakers are actually as imaginative as they like to think they are.

Perhaps we’re all magpies.

We take things that have happened to us, rearrange them, change a few names and convince ourselves that we’ve created fiction.

That element particularly fascinated me because I am myself writing a memoir involving events which took place twenty-two years ago. Inevitably, that involves questions about what can be remembered accurately, whose version of events is being recorded and whether the names of some of the people involved need to be changed. ‘Bitter Christmas’ understands that writing about the past isn’t simply an act of recollection. The moment we begin shaping memories into a narrative, we are already changing them.

The film’s writer does precisely that. Things happening to him in the present begin modifying the fictional world he has supposedly located twenty years earlier. The past becomes less something remembered than something continually rewritten according to present needs.

In that respect, the film is rather more interesting than its story sometimes allows it to be.

The Christmas element, however, feels surprisingly tangential. I’ve always been interested in films where Christmas effectively becomes a supporting character – where the season doesn’t necessarily dominate the plot but provides an emotional or visual backdrop against which everything else takes place. Christmas can intensify loneliness, family tensions, romance or nostalgia simply by being present.

Here, despite the title ‘Bitter Christmas’, I never particularly felt Christmas inhabiting the film.

Elsa’s migraines take place over the Christmas holidays, but that’s largely the extent of the seasonal dimension. Visually, with its warm and frequently summery colours, this hardly feels like a Christmas film at all. Perhaps that disjunction is deliberate.

Tonally, the film is considerably more successful when Almodóvar allows himself some humour.

Once we understand that Elsa is partly a fictional construction, certain elements of her life suddenly become amusingly extravagant. She has an extraordinarily sexy boyfriend who manages to combine being a firefighter by day with working as a stripper by night. It’s almost as though the screenwriter has simply started designing the most desirable romantic partner he can imagine.

This leads to some very funny encounters when affluent people in smart apartments look at him and say, in effect, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

And, yes, they do.

He was the stripper at the party they attended the previous weekend.

There is something very Almodóvar about that collision between bourgeois respectability and uninhibited sexuality. The respectable world and the supposedly transgressive world aren’t really separate at all. They merely encounter one another in different clothes.

But the film becomes increasingly complicated as its fictional levels accumulate.

We have characters inside a screenplay, characters based upon real people, a filmmaker apparently standing outside that screenplay and events in the present which begin reshaping the fictionalized past. Eventually it becomes something approaching a film within a screenplay within another film, and I did begin to wonder whether all this structural cleverness was actually bringing us closer to the characters or pushing us further away from them.

The more conscious we become of the machinery of storytelling, the harder it becomes to become emotionally immersed in the story being told. Every time we begin investing in Elsa, we’re reminded that Elsa may be somebody’s invention. Every apparent truth might simply be another rewrite.

That may well be Almodóvar’s intention. After all, memory itself works rather like this. We tell stories about our past until eventually we may remember the story more clearly than the original event.

But intellectually understanding the device doesn’t necessarily make the film dramatically satisfying.

By the end, Almodóvar almost seems to anticipate that criticism. A character berates the screenwriter – whom it is tempting to regard as at least partly a stand-in for Almodóvar himself – for not being especially imaginative with his characters.

It’s a wonderfully self-deprecating moment.

Is Almodóvar criticising himself before we have the opportunity to do it?

Perhaps.

There is something appealing about a filmmaker examining his own creative process and admitting that artists don’t manufacture entire universes from nothing. They borrow, steal, remember, exaggerate and rearrange. The people we meet become characters; conversations become dialogue; painful experiences acquire beginnings, middles and endings that real life never conveniently supplied.

And maybe that is where ‘Bitter Christmas’ is most successful.

It isn’t really about Christmas at all. Nor, ultimately, is it particularly concerned with whether Elsa’s story is ‘real’. It is about the unstable territory between memory and invention, and about what happens when an artist turns life into narrative.

The difficulty is that Almodóvar becomes so fascinated by that process that the audience can occasionally feel left outside it. Rather than disappearing into his fictional world, we are constantly reminded that we are watching somebody construct one.

Perhaps that is precisely the point.

But there is a difference between being fascinated by the process of somebody writing a screenplay and being fascinated by the screenplay they eventually write. ‘Bitter Christmas’ is much more successful at the former than the latter.

It is playful, self-reflexive and occasionally very funny, but it also meanders. Almodóvar remains fascinated by desire, memory and the stories people tell about themselves, although this time I sometimes felt that I was watching him rearranging familiar pieces rather than discovering something genuinely new.

Still, the film leaves behind a fascinating question for anybody who has ever written about their own life: once somebody we know becomes a character on the page, where exactly does their story end and ours begin?