Stimulating cinema: Biutiful

Year released: 2010
Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Darkly magnificent and hauntingly memorable, this film deservedly earned an Oscar nomination for lead actor Javier Bardem. More so than even the story, what I will remember most from this film is the images--the snowy Pyreneean prologue, the wild chase through the streets as the cops try to apprehend the drug-dealing Senegalese, the tortured, failed beauty of Uxbal's ex-wife Marambra. Such a good film--I wonder why more didn't like it. Review is from the London Observer's Philip French and was published on January 29, 2011.

Barcelona is one of the world's most photogenic cities, as demonstrated in more than three decades of movies, from Antonioni's dazzling "The Passenger" to Woody Allen's touristy "Vicky Christina Barcelona" and Jim Jarmusch's elegant "The Limits of Control." All three play up the glories of its architectural heritage and the works of Antoni Gaudí. In Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Biutiful," which is entirely centred on the turbulent suburbs occupied by desperate immigrants from Africa, Asia and eastern Europe, we're hardly aware of being in that city at all. It is a shock suddenly to see in a distant cityscape the familiar outline of Gaudí's Sagrada Família and later to be faced with an idyllic Mediterranean beach littered with the dead bodies of illegal immigrants.

Biutiful brings together for the first time the brilliant Mexican director of Amores Perros and the greatest Spanish actor of his generation, Javier Bardem, after both have enjoyed considerable success in the States, Iñárritu having worked with Brad Pitt on Babel and Bardem having won an Oscar in the Coen Brother's "No Country for Old Men" as well as having been Julia Roberts heart-throb in "Eat Pray Love."

If the film has a model, it's Akira Kurosawa's masterly "Ikiru" (aka "Living"), which took a hackneyed subject--the way a middle-aged Japanese civil servant reacts to the news that he has terminal cancer--and transformed it into a profound statement about the human condition. The protagonist of "Biutiful" is Uxbal, a man from southern Spain, who at fortysomething looks in poor physical shape and first reveals his true condition to us when he passes blood. It transpires that he has neglected to have medical check-ups and his painful prostate cancer has been metastasising, leaving him with a couple of months to live.

The movie has a circular motion, beginning and ending with Uxbal handing his mother's ring to his young daughter and recalling a dream-like encounter in a snow-covered forest. This sets the mood for a harsh, unsentimental narrative of redemption and putting one's life in order as a prelude to death. Uxbal does not have the time or the social privileges that allow him to indulge in the doubt and despair of Kurosawa's civil servant or to negotiate those five stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross taught Americans to prepare for in "On Death and Dying."

Uxbal is too poor, hard-pressed and desperate for that, which is not to say that he isn't a man of sensibility and moral intelligence beneath his tough peasant exterior. In league with his brother, Tito, he's up to his neck in petty criminality while exploiting and helping Chinese and African immigrants who make a living on the streets of Barcelona. He's divorced from his wife, the good-looking, chain-smoking, hard-drinking Marambra, and he's raising his two small children Ana and Mateo on a small income. Moreover, his apparent psychic gifts allow him to earn a bit of dubious extra cash.

Without recourse to social counselling, Uxbal must continue his dodging and weaving in his 24-hour-a-day hustling to feed his family, cope with the problematic Marambra and look out for his immigrant clients. In the event, his good intentions don't help and very little turns out well. He goes to jail, people die as a result of his actions and he's forced to sell the family tomb and have his father's embalmed body cremated. One could say his life ends in tragedy. Yet what we see is a decent man striving to do his best in terrible circumstances. Sharing his pain and observing his struggle, we think of Browning's lines: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what's a heaven for?" In this light, his end seems a kind of moral triumph.

Iñárritu's previous films have been multilayered narratives. Here, he sticks to a single, admittedly richly vibrant milieu and a central character who appears in virtually every frame. He's brilliantly served by the handsome, imposing Bardem, whose expressive face and large battered nose resembles a deposed Roman emperor who's spent a lifetime in fairground boxing booths. This is a further contribution to an astonishing gallery of characters Bardem's created these past few years, ranging from a troubled intellectual and a police chief to a romantic artist and a sadistic killer. The versatile actor he most reminds me of is Anthony Quinn.

One must also mention the harsh, atmospheric photography by Rodrigo Prieto, who's shot all of Iñárritu's films to date as well as Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" and "Lust, Caution." Bardem is unlikely to win the best actor Oscar for which he has been nominated, but in the absence of "Of Gods and Men" from the shortlist, it seems likely that "Biutiful" will win the Academy Award for best foreign language film.