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.

Stimulating cinema: Spirit of the Beehive

Director: Victor Erice
Year: 1973

Wow.

That's the best way to describe this one. Although, in the spirit of full disclosure, I can't say that I understood every single nuance in this many-layered picture. As I watched it, I kept telling myself "pay attention, don't get lost!" I did a lot of reading about this film in preparing this post and it helped clear up some of the muddy areas. And I will certainly watch this again--probably as soon as I can. It's really that good. This is a movie that demands the full attention of the viewer and even then will almost certainly take more than one viewing to "catch" everything. But those are my problems and not the problems of the movie, which is really quite brilliant.

I think most people can relate to this movie in the sense that essentially it's a film about childhood. More to the point, it's about how scary childhood can sometimes seem. The fear can come from anywhere--outside influences, your parents or a sibling. It's about capturing the feeling you get when you are lying in bed with your stomach in knots listening to your parents discuss something serious (although the parents in this one are dissociated and don't discuss anything with--or even have much contact with--one another). It's about the way you feel when you are trying to navigate through your feelings when dealing with a world around you that you don't understand. Maybe I can relate to this so well because my parents frequently fought (and eventually divorced). Even now as an adult, there are still a lot of things about growing up in that environment that I am still coming to terms with. I won't say "traumatized," that would be unfair. But I was profoundly affected by the frequent "not-knowing" of it all--just like the character of Ana is profoundly affected by her (dysfunctional) family life and the mystery of the world around her.

Our story begins with the actual words "once upon a time" and what follows is a dreamy allegory, heavily infused with long silences, stark scenery and much beauty. The setting is 1940 in post-civil war Spain in a village on the Castillian plain. The local children are terribly excited by the arrival of a mobile movie truck which is bringing what the promoter calls the greatest film ever shown in the village. The movie is James Whale's horror classic "Frankenstein," which is finally arriving in this part of the world nine years after its release in the States. It helps to have a familiarity with "Frankenstein" before watching this, especially the famous scene where the monster approaches the little girl who is playing with flowers by the lake.

In the audience are two sisters, Isabel (Isabel Telleria) who is about eight or so, and Ana (Ana Torrent) who is a little younger. Ana is naturally haunted by the scene between the monster and the girl and appeals to her sister for answers. Isabel replies (with the certainty that only the innocence of youth) that everything in the movies is fake but that she knows a spirit who can be summoned whenever she wants to. This, to mind my mind, rattled Ana even further and sent her spiraling toward the movie's climactic scenes.

The girls' parents, Fernando (Fernando Fernan Gomez), a beekeeper, and the much younger Teresa (Teresa Gimpera, who has penned letters to someone far away who may or may not be a lover) are distant and largely uninvolved (although the scene where the dad takes the girls mushroom-gathering was quite touching). Many critics made note of the fact that the four members of the family are never seen together in the same scene. Instead it's always groups of twos and threes. Even during the wonderful scene at the dinner table, each shot is on an individual only and not the group. The family is fragmented and is clearly pulling in three (and later four) different directions.

The strain is showing. Fernando keeps to himself and his bees (which serve as an allegory for Spain under the Fascist dictatorship--orderly, organized but without imagination, feeling or joy). Teresa is withdrawn and sad. Isabel grows increasingly mean, even sadistic. She tries to strangle a cat at one point and plays a horrible prank on Ana later on. Ana, meanwhile, muddles along, steeling herself against her family and the unknown world outside of her home life.

Isabel takes Ana to an abandoned house in the middle of a windblown, forlorn field (these scenes are amazingly, hauntingly beautiful). She claims it's the house of the spirit and Ana returns alone several times to search for it. Eventually, a real spirit comes to inhabit the house--a wounded soldier who leaps from a passing train and takes refuge in the house. Soon enough, Ana encounters the soldier and though little words are spoken between them, they soon come to trust each other. Ana brings food and her dad's coat but when she returns one day, the soldier is gone. The only traces of him ever having been there are the bloodstains on the stones and hay. Ana's fears coalesce at this moment and she runs away, leading to an ending that is neither happy nor sad. You could say that nothing is resolved or that everything is. It's one of the wonders of this film--that you could endlessly debate it, analyze it and ponder it and never really be right or wrong.

Ana Torrent gives a haunting performance as young Ana. Despite her young age, it seems like she's already been through a lot in life and has been scarred. She's still an innocent kid of course, but real life and it's horrors are never too far from her. The cinematography is absolutely breathtaking. According to a couple of articles I read, the cinematographer, Luis Cuardados, was going blind during the filming (imagine!) This makes the overall look of the film even more sumptuous and incredible and director Erice maintains a delicate pace throughout. Erice's work here is truly monumental and even though his overall body of work is limited, he should be regarded in high esteem by those who love movies.