Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Starring Javier Bardem, Blanca Portillo, Maricel Álvarez, Rubén Ochandiano 15A cert, Queen’s, Belfast; Cineworld/IFI/ Light House, Dublin, 147 min
Javier Bardem is stunning as a dead man walking in Alejandro González Iñárritu's brilliantly bleak and existential Spanish drama, writes TARA BRADY
ALEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ Iñárritu exploded onto the film scene in 2000, when Amores Perros, his remarkable debut feature, found an international cult audience. Since then the Mexican director has retained a striking and unique cinematic presence. His characteristically fractured, bilingual portraits of tormented, lost souls rarely qualify as date movies or entertainments, but few can rival his knack for portentous brooding and overwrought humanism.
With this in mind, showboating Hollywood heavyweights Sean Penn, Cate Blanchet and Brad Pitt all took hair-raising, selfless pay cuts to work on the coruscating 21 Gramsand the rather less appealing Babel. Was this last picture the start of diminishing returns? Had all those A-listers turned the former wunderkind's head?
Biutiful, the director's first film since he split from his talented screenwriting partner Guillermo Arriaga, marks a stout return to feel-bad Hispanophone firma. There is, as ever, a multicultural feel to the variously Spanish, African and Chinese cast but, unlike its predecessors, Biutifulis rooted to Barcelona and its less picturesque suburbs. Where once the director sought meaning in globe-hopping commonalities, here he maps interiority.
An intimate and haunting character study of Javier Bardem's doomed hero, Uxbal, and the gloomy slums wherein he plies his various backstreet trades, Biutifulis merciless in its use of dramatic irony.
Uxbal, a single dad struggling to cope with two children and the knowledge that he’s soon to succumb to cancer, refuses to profit from his ability to speak with the recently deceased, but has fewer qualms about bossing illegal Chinese immigrants in a leather-goods sweatshop. Desperate to leave his children and errant bipolar ex-wife with means, the increasingly stooped protagonist’s frantic wheeling and dealing inadvertently leads to a terrible tragedy.
As if we weren’t stricken enough. Long before this grim twist presents itself, we’ve watched Bardem urinating blood, wearing incontinence pants and communing with the lately departed. It’s a stunning, bravura performance; even in death Bardem has enough intensity to carry the picture.
Like Lukas Moodysson's recent Mammoth, Biutifulteases a remarkably linear and personal narrative out of all the rank, insidious exploitation it seeks to expose. Handsome visuals and poignant pillow shots confirm its status as An Important Film, one that's weighted by serious preoccupations and a solemn tone.
It's seldom easy viewing, nor is it supposed to be. Biutifultrades on misery and mortality. It rains Biblical afflictions on its characters. When it isn't melancholic, it's harrowing. Its cathartic effects require its audience to sign up for nothing less than voluntary psychological waterboarding. Taken on its own heavy terms, it's near perfect.
Bardem makes for mesmerising yet disquieting company, the director strikes a low and effective blow with global realpolitik, and the dead walk the earth. It is this otherworldliness that alerts us to the scope of the film-maker’s vision. No longer satisfied with trifling corporeal pursuits, Iñárritu is gazing out into the hereafter.
Biutiful's magic realist tendencies and canny, mercurial structure allows its ghosts to breathe. This is the same cinematically plausible afterlife that Gaspar Noé sought to capture with Touching the Void. It may be a polite fiction but it's certainly something to see. Babel indeed.
