Rated: M
Directed by: Gastón Duprat & Mariano Cohn
Written by: Andrés Duprat, Gastón Duprat & Mariano Cohn
Starring: Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas & Oscar Martínez.
Viewed in Spanish with English subtitles.
‘What a wanker.’
It’s Humberto’s (José Luis Gómez) 80th birthday. His life summed up in the presents laid out before him: a massage chair, a Virgin Mary under a glass dome, a rifle set in its casing. A painting of a sad clown.
He’s a millionaire who feels like he has money but no prestige.
He wants to be remembered, differently.
He decides he wants to build a bridge. Or a movie. Yes, fund a movie. A good one. Only the best.
Enter award winning director, Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz).
Humberto buys the rights of a Nobel Prize winning novel to base this, only-the-best movie on, and having failed to read it, he asks Lola what it’s about.
She explains its about a rivalry between two brothers. She has the two actors in mind to build on that rivalry for the film:
Iván Torres (Oscar Martínez): a teacher, an academic, an actor of integrity and respect.
And, Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas): popular, multi-award winning and arriving at rehearsal in a Lamborghini pashing his latest.
Let the butting of egos begin.
Official Competition is a movie about making a movie, most of the set in an expansive, minimalist house as Lola pulls the actors into the minds of their characters.
Kinda sounds boring, but it’s brilliant watching the techniques used to get the ego’s of these two actors into a place so Lola gets the tone she needs for each scene.
‘I want the truth,’ she demands.
Have to say, Penélope Cruz as Lola looks amazing as the sensitive, brilliant and dedicated director, Lola. She is the wild, red curly-haired, sensitive and very aware puppeteer.
The film is about how very different these two actors she’s chosen to play the parts as brothers, are; to then realise, they’re as vain as each other.
Iván at one point is seen to be accepting a pretend Academy Award in the mirror, after denying he’d ever lower himself to the popularist farce, and of course not speaking anything but Spanish, to announce in his pretend speech that he was only attending the ceremony to formally reject the award.
Meanwhile, Lola looks incredulously at an online video of Félix making a plea to save the pink dolphin.
I just kept bursting out laughing.
It’s hilarious, all set to Lola’s tricks, using big screens in the background of monologues, rocks suspended over their heads during rehearsal, the sound of kissing while surrounded by microphones, a meat grinder used to signify transition but also showing the edge of Lola’s destruction.
Even Iván’s wife, Violeta (Pilar Castro) an academic hipster who’s written a children’s book is shown as vain as Iván shares a new piece of discordant music where she comments on the brilliance of the tribal drumming. But no, that’s just next door banging on the wall, again.
This is one of those quietly clever films that seems like it’s not about much but then gives you a tickle when the cleverness of a layer reveals itself.
The whole film’s about ego so in the end the film finishes with a forced clever ending with an ego all of its own.
Great acting, unique and clever story and a good laugh.