Biutiful

Last night I finally saw a film that inspired me to get this blog going again. Believe me when I say that Biutiful by Alejandro González Iñárritu is an absolute MASTERPIECE.

First I want to talk about how overjoyed I am about this film before I get into it. I had been thinking lately that I am so tired of being excited for a new movie/book/album/season from a director/author/music artist/tv show that I love, and then it comes out and it is just mediocre and I sit here defending it because even though I know it’s not as good as whatever came before, I still love it. I am a loyal fan.

So, when I went to see Biutiful, I was nervous. Alejandro González Iñárritu (henceforth Iñárritu) has been one of my favorite directors for a while. I’m a huge fan of Spanish-language cinema, especially Mexican films. His 2000 Amores Perros is one of my all time favorite films. I also love 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) — all three films together are his “death trilogy.” I was prepared to love this film no matter what, but was worried it was going to be mediocre and I would be the only one defending it. But, he proved me so wrong! This is also his first film where he didn’t collaborate with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (sidenote-he directed his first feature The Burning Plain which everyone hated but which I defended, sensing a pattern here?) and he wrote the story and the script himself. And he did a heartbreakingly amazing job. But enough with the adjectives.

I almost don’t know where to begin. What is this film about? It’s about death, sadness, family, sickness, language, love, the afterlife, immigration, and sweatshops. That doesn’t even begin to describe it. Also, it stars Javier Bardem who is nominated for Best Actor and who totally deserves the award, but I won’t hold my breath.

Uxbal (heartbreakingly played by Bardem) finds out he has a terminal illness and only a few months to live. He does not receive treatment for it and lives out the rest of his life, while everything around him falls apart. Although the film progressively gets more and more tragic and depressing, it never feels insincere, overwrought, or too sentimental. It is perfect. You empathize with this character, you feel for his two beautiful children who have no idea they are going to lose their father, you even feel for his mentally ill abusive ex-wife Marambra (wonderfully played by Maricel Álvarez).

Uxbal with children Mateo and Ana

Death in this film is portrayed as part of life. Death has always been a part of Uxbal’s life, when we learn that he can communicate with the dead. (Again, something that could have been overwrought and ruin the film but was understated and sad). His biggest job with communicating with the dead is helping them find peace so that they can move on. This job is extremely relevant when Uxbal’s fellow psychic friend tells him to “get your affairs in order. Don’t leave anything unfinished.” I suppose psychics know better than anyone that if you leave something unfinished, you can’t move on to the afterlife. Uxbal helps dead strangers move on, and now he needs to find his own peace before he dies. But everything keeps going wrong.

Another chilling use of death in the film is the death of Uxbal’s father. His father, shortly after impregnating Uxbal’s mother with Uxbal, fled Franco’s Spain to Mexico when he was 20 and died of pneumonia two weeks later. (How’s that for depressing irony?) Apparently, the place where Uxbal’s father is buried is set to become a mall that will be built on top of all the dead people. Uxbal and his brother decide to have their father removed and cremated. When his father is removed, Uxbal “meets” him for the first time. A rotting corpse (not as terrible as I thought it might look) that died at age 20. My friend Sarah pointed out how crazy it must be for Uxbal, who is at least in his 40s, to see his father, frozen in time as a young 20 year old. This juxtaposition of young and old, death and life is so poignant and sad. When Uxbal tells his children about his father, his son Mateo says “That sucks growing up without a dad,” and the whole audience cringed because this child is going to have to do the same thing.

There is not much hope in this film but when there is, it glimmers brightly. In one scene, Uxbal, his ex-wife Marambra and their two children Ana and Mateo sit at the table as a family eating ice cream. Marambra says it’s more fun to stick your fingers in the ice cream and eat it and the children start doing the same thing. Uxbal, always the tougher and more responsible parent, tells his children to stop doing that and not to be disgusting. Eventually, he comes around and eats the ice cream with his fingers and everybody laughs. It’s such a joyous scene at the surface but it still manages to be depressing because you know that a) the relationship between Uxbal and Marambra is never going to work out and b) Uxbal is going to die and his family has no idea.

Uxbal and Marambra

This screwed up family dynamic is very typical of Iñárritu. In Amores Perros, three separate storylines show different kinds of families, all of them broken. Another theme that Iñárritu seems to love is language and language barriers. At its core, that’s what Babel is about. Filmed in different parts of the world, using English, Spanish, Japanese, French, Arabic, and even Japanese sign language, we see the way language can separate people and bring them together, and how some situations can even transcend language and cultural barriers.

Gael García Bernal in Amores Perros

Biutiful is set in Barcelona (the wonderful cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto whom Iñárritu often works with, shows the gritty urban impoverished area of Barcelona outside of the Gaudi buildings and tourist attractions) and most of the characters speak Spanish. But, in Uxbal’s business he works with Chinese and Senegalese immigrants, and so we have those two languages as well. The (English) subtitles were done in a clever way: white text when they are speaking Spanish, blue text for Mandarin Chinese, and yellow text for Wolof (language spoken in Senegalese). What’s even more interesting is trying to figure out which characters can understand which languages. The Chinese characters can understand each other, but Uxbal speaks to them in Spanish. The same goes for the Senegalese characters. In one final glimmer of hope in the film, Uxbal’s Senegalese business partner’s wife Ige comes to live with Uxbal (well, Uxbal lets her live there because she has no money and got evicted) and takes care of him as he dies. Ige speaks some Spanish, but she speaks slowly and with a foreigner’s accent, I assume she can understand some Spanish as well but she and Uxbal manage to communicate despite all of this.

Biutiful is a story about how people can come together and be torn apart by death. How people can transcend language barriers to work and live together. At its darkest moments, it still has beauty. The scenes with Uxbal and his children together are heartbreaking because we know these children will be left alone with their unfit mother and they have no idea they are about to lose their father. But these scenes are beautiful because Uxbal is an excellent father (albeit strict), he is caring and funny and he loves his children, and you can’t help but smile at their relationship.

As I’m sure you could have guessed, there is no happy ending, although we do get to see Uxbal meet his father in some kind of snowy forest “purgatory” before he moves on. This is the same scene that plays at the beginning of the film, and Uxbal’s father tells/asks him two separate things: 1) Did you know that owls cough up a hairball before they die? and 2) What does the sea sound like? Throughout the film, Uxbal’s son Mateo shares the fact about the owls with Uxbal. And as Uxbal lays dying next to his daughter Ana, she asks him what the sea sounds like. Then, the film fades into the same snowy scene, and again we see Uxbal’s father relay those two pieces of information. I think there must be many ways to interpret this as it is clearly some kind of metaphor that has a deeper meaning. For me, it was as if Uxbal’s father was doing Uxbal’s job: consoling the dead, trying to help them find peace so that they can move on. By using two specific things that Uxbal’s children have said, his father reminds him that he raised two wonderful children who loved him, and that those children will never forget him, and that it is ok to move on. The film ends with Uxbal asking “what’s that over there?” And we are left to assume it’s some kind of “light” or Heaven, which means that Uxbal is at peace and can move on.

With the Oscars coming up, I hope Biutiful can at least win best foreign film, although I have a feeling it won’t win anything, but it’s ok, because at least this time I know that this film was NOT mediocre and I am not the only one to defend it.

Alejandro González Iñárritu, thank you for this biutiful gift

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Little Ashes: Empieza el llanto

Look, I know. I know that everybody hates this movie. It got a whopping 24% on Rotten Tomatoes. A.O. Scott thought it was terrible. But too bad for them, because as usual, I enjoyed a film that got horrible reviews, although I’m not going to try to defend it. Paul Morrison’s 2008 film Little Ashes tells the supposed story of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, artist Salvador Dalí, and filmmaker Luis Buñuel and their time together at a university before they became famous. It mostly focuses on the “romance” between García Lorca and Dalí, but what I found most interesting was what the film seems to say about the nature of each different type of artist.

First, I should agree that it is not a great film. My biggest problem is that it should have been in Spanish, not English spoken with a Spanish accent. It takes place in Spain in the 1920s. Come on. Also, some of the dialog is unintentionally funny when it is supposed to be poignant. And there were several points throughout the film where I thought to myself, “Wow, is poetry and art really such a complete load of pretentious bullshit, or is this movie just bad?”

Javier Beltrán as Federico García Lorca

Moving on. I’ll start with Federico García Lorca, played by Javier Beltrán. He is the most sensitive (whiny) character out of the three of them. He’s always so upset, pining away for Dalí who just can’t love him back. Jealous of Buñuel going back and forth between him and Dalí. He is also a poet, and poets are supposed to be in touch with their feelings, and the film makes him as stereotypical of a poet as possible. I didn’t really like how every couple of scenes, his voiceover would read one of his poems. (Often he started reading them in Spanish, and then the Spanish would fade out and he would read them in English. Why not just have subtitles? The poems sound so beautiful in Spanish.) It tried to hard to make his poems seem significant to the film, to the situation, and the poems just don’t work like that. It did the real García Lorca a disservice, whose poetry is expressive and wonderful. But the film just makes him look like an emo kid.

Robert Pattinson as Salvador Dalí

I think most people don’t like this movie because of “Twilight heartthrob” Robert Pattinson. Why does every reviewer have to put “Twilight heartthrob” before his name, as if anyone needs to be reminded of the unfortunate existence of Twilight? Anyway, in Little Ashes, Dalí is a complete basket case. In the beginning, he is painfully awkward and shy and seems to hear voices and actually be mentally ill. He is a surrealist painter which is associated with being “crazy,” and the film really pushes that stereotype. After he becomes famous, his “craziness” is more of an act, with the moustache and everything. In general, he is aloof, he leads on poor García Lorca, and in the end he is just obsessed with money. I don’t really know where the film was going with Dalí’s character, but I guess the real Dalí was such a mystery, and the film doesn’t try to solve it.

Matthew McNulty as Luis Buñuel

Matthew McNulty plays Luis Buñuel, and according to Little Ashes, Buñuel was a total jerk. Homophobic, self-centered, and a filmmaker. He was always wanting to go out and party while sensitive García Lorca wanted to stay home with crazy Dalí and drink tea. Buñuel kept saying how he was so over Spain and wanted to go to Paris. He didn’t seem to value “art” the same way the other two did, he was most interested in getting everyone’s names out there and being awesome. I can see the connection between his characterization and the stereotype of a filmmaker, kind of. I also had no idea that García Lorca took Buñel and Dalí’s Un chien andalou as a personal insult. It translates to “An Andalusian Dog.” In the film, García Lorca says, “I mean, do they even know anyone else from Andalusia?” So sad and tragic, poor little Fede.

Strange stereotypes aside, when the film ended I did some research on each of the three artists, having only briefly studied them in the past. I read a lot about Gala, Dalí’s Russian wife who famously slept around with all the surrealists in Paris, because she and Dalí had an “arrangement.” She also was a muse to many artists, including Dalí. Dalí starting signing his paintings with both of their names because, “It is mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures.”

One of Dalí’s paintings of Gala

Also, if you haven’t yet seen Buñuel and Dalí’s Un chien andalou, YouTube has the whole thing in two parts:

It’s crazy, creepy, and important. And finally, my favorite poem by Federico García Lorca, “La guitarra”

Empieza el llanto
de la guitarra.
Se rompen las copas
de la madrugada.
Empieza el llanto
de la guitarra.
Es inútil
callarla.
Es imposible
callarla.
Llora monótona
como llora el agua,
como llora el viento
sobre la nevada.
Es imposible
callarla.
Llora por cosas
lejanas.
Arena del Sur caliente
que pide camelias blancas.
Llora flecha sin blanco,
la tarde sin mañana,
y el primer pájaro muerto
sobre la rama.
¡Oh guitarra!
Corazón malherido
por cinco espadas.

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