Biutiful
Alejandro González Iñárritu (2010)
Some reviewers (Ryan Gilbey and Anthony Lane, for example) have expressed relief that Iñárritu has abandoned the multiple, fractured narrative of 21 Grams and Babel in favour of something more or less linear here. Watching those earlier films, it was obvious that the time-place structure was an attempt to gussy up a story that would have been much less remarkable without it – but the attempt succeeded, especially in Babel. Removing this kind of elaboration in Biutiful makes for an overlong and often dull film. Apart from the odd supernatural excursion, it all takes place in Barcelona and is largely the story of one man, called Uxbal (Javier Bardem), who’s living and dying there. But Iñárritu is still straining for a global miserabilism: an African immigrant family is broken up when the father is deported to Senegal; a group of Asian sweatshop workers die. And because these stories are so subsidiary to the main character’s, the effect is more hollow than in Babel, where at least the sections in Morocco, Japan and the US-Mexico all got roughly equal coverage and carried similar weight.
Iñárritu has a gift for capturing the duality of big cities – the electric warmth and soullessness of neon, the implacable dignity of tall, lit buildings against night skies. His resident cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto does here for Barcelona what he did for the Japanese sequences in Babel. Much of the action in Biutiful takes place in an underbelly of the city unfamiliar to international audiences at least (Montjuïc, familiar as the site of the Olympic stadium, is the location of a crematorium here), and the sustained contrasts between bright colours and dinginess, between large and cramped spaces, give the film a strong visual rhythm. There are fine images (a vivid blur of multi-coloured lights in a street shot through a car’s steamed up windscreen) and the sequence in which the police pursue the Senegalese street vendors through a packed city centre in broad daylight is brilliantly edited (by Stephen Mirrione, another Iñárritu regular) and orchestrated, the breakneck speed of the chase punctuated every so often by a body coming to a crashing halt. For all the skill, though, there’s a persistent showing off in the film-making and the lack of convincing intelligence beneath the visuals renders them bombastic. The same applies to Gustavo Santaolalla’s score, more complicated but less effective than the ones he wrote for Brokeback Mountain and Babel.
How to describe Uxbal’s line of work? You could call him a facilitator – for the Chinese handbag factory, for the African peddlers of those bags, for his son and daughter (he’s a loving and competent father), for bereaved families with whose lost loved ones Uxbal is able to communicate. But Uxbal is a facilitator especially for Iñárritu, who puts these different elements in one individual because it suits his purpose – the purpose being to pile up world-shattering agonies and miseries and, on this occasion, to achieve it through the medium of a single character. Iñárritu, who wrote the screenplay with Armando Bo and Nicolas Giacabone, provides little synergy between the various facets of Uxbal’s existence. Uxbal learns at an early stage that he has cancer which has metastasised and is terminal – the hospital doctor can offer ‘quality of life’ for only a month or two. Yet Uxbal’s cancer is still, for all the prevailing grimness, cancer of the cinema screen – a fatal illness which presents the sufferer with the moral challenge of setting his affairs in order rather than any bodily ordeals. Javier Bardem looks like death warmed up but there’s not a strong sense of physical degeneration and the access of overwhelming pain is occasional and designed for dramatic effect. Uxbal’s psychic capacities don’t go very deep: when he tells his friend Bea, a motherly confidante, about his illness, she has to remind him that ‘Death is not the end’. Uxbal is deeply remorseful about the deaths of the Chinese workers (caused by a gas leak from the cheap heaters he bought for their makeshift dormitory) but these don’t seem to connect with his own impending demise. In any case, the world Uxbal inhabits, before he learns he’s dying, is oppressively hostile: the diagnosis seems merely the latest of his problems.
Iñárritu wants to use his protagonist to express a weltanschauung which seems to be the director’s rather than the character’s: as a result, Biutiful is exceedingly dependent for any kind of coherence on the actor playing Uxbal, and the director made an unbeatably shrewd choice in casting Javier Bardem. First, there’s his epic physiognomy (Bardem may have lost weight to do the film but, as in No Country for Old Men, I was surprised to see such a spare body beneath the shapeless casual clothes and that sculptural head). Second, he’s a fine and truthful actor – there’s not a false move or gesture of expression in sight here. Bardem’s remarkable face, in combination with his interpretative skills, enables him to create characters that seem archetypal yet his scenes with the two children in Biutiful are easily natural. Uxbal is gloomy company but the purity and eloquence of Bardem’s acting command our sympathy and admiration. Thanks to him, and in spite of Iñárritu’s schematic construction of the character, we get the sense of a complete personality; and it’s the fact that Bardem is such a powerful presence on screen that makes Uxbal’s approaching death matter to us.
In spite of the sketchiness of their roles, there are good performances too from Ana Wagener as Bea; Diaryatou Daff as Ige, the Senegalese woman who decides to look after Uxbal’s children so that he can die at peace; Rubén Ochandiano as a policeman; and, especially, Eduard Fernandez, as Uxbal’s affably seedy brother, Tito. At one point Uxbal goes to the strip club Tito runs and is introduced by his brother to a pretty girl. After a few drinks, he tells her he’s dying (she’s the first person he confides in after Bea). The girl is fluidly played by Martina Garcia: she’s baffled when Uxbal gets serious; when he starts to laugh and she can believe he’s joking about the cancer, her smiling relief doesn’t quite conceal a lingering doubt. Uxbal’s two children – nearly adolescent Ana (Hanaa Bouchaib) and her younger brother Mateo (Guillermo Estrella) – are already steeped in lacrimae rerum, and this makes their happier moments poignant. (The unhappy moments can be really distressing – as when Uxbal, himself losing control of his bladder functions as a result of his illness, finds that Mateo has been punished by his mother for wetting the bed.) Marambra, the bipolar, masseuse-cum-prostitute wife from whom Uxbal is separated, is more of a problem. Maricel Alvarez, who plays her, is a well-known stage actress in Argentina and making her big screen debut here. She shares with Bardem an extraordinary profile (this gives an almost surreal edge to an anecdote the couple tell their kids about romantic nose-picking) but they don’t have much else in common – it’s hard to see how or why Uxbal and Marambra got together, except that Iñárritu needs Uxbal to have a distressing, burdensome wife to add to his woes. Alvarez’s Marambra, although convincingly ill at ease with the two children, is excessively volatile, manic and depressed at very rapid intervals: she’s at her most expressive in her final scene, when Marambra is barely conscious. The lives of the two Chinese who run the sweatshop (Taisheng Cheng and Luo Jin) are further complicated by a guilty-seeming gay relationship between them, which ends with one killing the other: Iñárritu’s upping the misery ante in this thread of the story is particularly mechanical and gruelling.
The opening sequence of Biutiful in a snowy, out of this world forest is one of the most effective in the whole of this two-and-a-half hour film. Uxbal meets a young man, who imitates the sound of the sea, of the wind, then of the two together. There’s a sense of kinship between the two men which, at this stage, is inexplicable. It turns out that the young man is Uxbal’s father, who fled Franco’s Spain for Mexico when his wife was pregnant with Uxbal (the father died shortly after emigrating). It’s become obvious well before the end of Biutiful that the story will get back to this scene and so it does: the reprise (some of which is shot from different angles from the earlier version) doesn’t have the same power but this bit is so good the first time around that you’re pleased to see it again. It’s unfortunate that a film with a terminally ill protagonist is itself interminable – it’s a relief when Uxbal dies and we’re released from the cinema. I haven’t seen Amores Perros but Iñárritu seems to me here more phony and egotistical than before. As the credits roll, it seems a while before one appears that doesn’t include the name of Alejandro González Iñárritu. The dedication of Biutiful to the memory of his own father, described in the legend as ‘my noble oak’ or some such, adds to the pomposity. The film’s title derives from a conversation between Uxbal and his daughter, who asks, as she’s doing English homework, how you spell ‘beautiful’. Her father tells her, ‘You spell it the way it sounds’.
2 February 2011