A hotel library in London, and Pedro Almodóvar — black sunglasses still on, a corona of cotton-wool hair catching the afternoon light — is explaining why a film called Bitter Christmas is opening during a summer heatwave. "It is weird," he concedes, with the slow, unapologetic shrug of a man who has spent five decades delighting in exactly that kind of productive contradiction. The shades eventually come off, and what they reveal is a left eye bruised to a gluey purple by a stye, the possible souvenir of a swimming pool he is reluctant to abandon. "I do swim almost every day because I have a pool," he sighs, and the words carry a melancholy so elaborately comic that they might have been lifted from one of his own screenplays.

At 76, the director has won more than sixty awards — among them two Oscars, five Baftas and six Goyas — yet the body appears to be staging its own slow, absurdist revolt. He has been deaf in one ear since childhood; now, he says quietly, the other is beginning to follow. It is the kind of detail that, in an Almodóvar film, would arrive just before something outrageous or transcendent, and one suspects he knows this. Bitter Christmas, his twenty-fourth feature, is a cautionary tale built around the dangers of autofiction — a mode in which a writer cannibalises lived experience for art and must then reckon with what that hunger costs.

It is territory the Spanish director has circled since his guerrilla Super-8 days in post-Franco Madrid, when underground fans in Madrid and Barcelona contributed more than three thousand dollars toward the budget of his chaotic 1980 debut.