The annual October Mill Valley Film Festival is upon us once again, promising more great movies than anyone could absorb — even going full time. We had to pick ours from the program and hope for the best. One of the factors to weigh is whether you think the film in question has a chance to make it to the regular distribution channels and might come around later. The director and actors are some indication but we’ve missed some good movies in past years by relying on that too heavily.
Sunday night, by mutual agreement my wife and I went to see Biutiful, a Spanish language film set in Barcelona with heart throb Javier Bardem in the title role and directed by the well known Mexican newcomer Alejandro González Iñárritu [Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel.] In retrospect I should have been forewarned by the very gritty Amores Perros but the program write up beguiled me –“gorgeous tone poem…powerful lyricism, intense visual palette.” I had lived in Barcelona and loved it and our last filmic memory was Woody Allen’s Maria Cristina Barcelona, in which Bardem also appeared. Off we went for a date-night. Oh well.
Biutiful is likely the grittiest, most difficult to watch movies I’ve ever seen, including war films. Filmed in the poor barrios of Barcelona we see little of the fabled main streets and tourist attractions, except for some chase scenes — Police after African street vendors down the Ramblas. We do see people in poverty as is almost never filmed. Even poor people’s rooms in movies of my memory are somehow spare and clean after a fashion. Perhaps there are clothes on the unmade bed or dishes in the sink. Biutiful simply goes in and gets it: Africans in tiny corner rooms; Chinese sleeping on the floor of their work-space, dormitory style; Spanish in old rooms with peeling ceilings, dim halls, leaking refrigerators.
Bardem plays Uxbal, one of two brothers. He is the go-between for a Chinese family-company making knock-off purses, belts and other typical street good, and the African sellers. He handles the police with bribes and tried to keep the vendors away from the prohibited selling corners –which of course are the most lucrative — and from dabbling in drug sales to boost their pitiful income. He is the father of two with a wife who is manic-depressive, banned from seeing the children and who, when there, is abusive to them, especially to the boy. The trouble is Uxbal loves them all. In the midst of the chaos, deprivation, desperation he tries to keep everyone afloat even as he begins to suffer the pain wracked results of spreading cancer he had put off investigating for too long.
Like a realistic war movie there are many moments you have to talk to yourself: this is just a movie; this is just a movie. Uxbal and his wife Maramba (Marciel Alvarez) make you believe you are the fly on the wall spectator to her craziness and his confused resistance and longing for her. There are long moments you want to grab her by the hair and push her out of his life. If you met Alvarez in a supermarket line you’d likely start screaming at her. They are very very convincing. Guillermo Estrella as Mateo is a very compelling 7 year old boy, even when acting the abused child left at home. In the whole panoply of characters two immigrant women are the only two who give some sense of unconfused goodness: a Chinese woman, Li, with a small baby who does fill-in baby sitting for Uxbal, and Ige, from Senegal, also with an infant, who is the last angel as Uxbal succumbs to cancer.
Powerful, powerful stuff but not lifted up with much hope or even war movie adrenaline. Late in the movie, even a baby’s cry seems almost too much on top of all the other misery. I don’t suppose the vertigo and sweating I experienced from the close-up fast camera action helped my reaction but even so it was bone shattering grim. I don’t know if Iñárritu can know how it looks to a first time viewer; his view of it has to be underpinned by the magnificent performances of his actors. Would it have been dishonest to find some bits of horse-play and happiness even the poor experience? Couldn’t he have shortened a very long sequence into his brother’s Hieronymus Bosch strip joint that went beyond the indicative to pornographic overindulgence?
I hope the movie makes it to the regular circuits but I can’t imagine much word-of-mouth buzz lifting its stay in local theaters. I’d say this is a must see but go prepared. It’s not a movie to follow a fine meal and bubbly wine. Sober and squinty eyed is how you’ll want to be. It may help if you read Iñárritu’s own essay about conceiving the film, written for the Cannes festival. You’ll be acquainted with the story and the characters. It might take the edge we experienced off your viewing. See especially his notes on Ige, whom he found in a beauty parlor and is playing her life for us on the screen. As Iñárritu says: Reality was dancing with fiction in front of my eyes… Igé starts out looking like a secondary role, but without seeing her coming, she ends up a cornerstone of the story. She is Mama Africa — a rational, intelligent, loving mother.