Hitting their marks

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This article was published 09/09/2022 (1341 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Movies about movies can be unbearably smug, but this sly Spanish satire manages to be self-aware but not self-indulgent, sharp but not nasty. Argentine directors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn also pull off a surprisingly breezy film of ideas. Official Competition (in Spanish, with subtitles) features lots of talk about creativity and commerce, art and life, but with its offhand absurdities and low-key critiques of pretension and vanity, it’s also laugh-out-loud funny.

Pharmaceutical billionaire Humberto Suarez (Jóse Luis Gómez) is turning 80. Assessing his legacy, he decides he possesses “an obscene fortune but no prestige.” And what says prestige like art? As a would-be 21st-century art patron, he decides to finance a work of cinema. Humberto hires eccentric auteur Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz), known for sparse and strange films that do well at Cannes, and — in a callback to Cohn and Duprat’s 2016 film The Distinguished Citizen — he buys the rights to a book by a Nobel Prize-winning writer.

The novel, titled Rivalry, centres on two brothers who are ferociously competitive but also intensely connected. To play these characters, Lola deliberately picks two men who will drive each other crazy.

Iván Torres (Oscar Martinez) is known for his commitment to experimental theatre and the occasional arthouse film, as well as his austere ethical life. He refuses to travel first-class on principle; on the other hand, he really, really likes to tell people this.

Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas) is a rich, famous superstar known for big, blockbuster entertainments, with a desperately thirsty social media presence and a complicated constellation of ex-wives, current girlfriends and current wife. He works to hang onto his good looks — when he’s on a film set, his co-workers are contractually forbidden to touch his face — and while he’s undeniably vain, his vulnerability can be touching.

Lola plans a “loose, very loose” adaptation of the story — so far, her notes on the project involve enigmatic scribbles and multimedia collages — and as she dives into the creative process with her two sniping actors, the professional, psychological and emotional conflicts start swirling.

Official Competition is basically a chamber piece, though the chamber happens to be a cavernous contemporary concrete building where Lola, Félix and Iván are rehearsing for nine days before they start filming. There’s not a lot of narrative momentum, but that’s kind of beside the point.

This is a movie about acting, and the performances are everything. All three leads do something very tricky — they genuinely and generously inhabit their characters while simultaneously sending them up.

There are some art-life parallels, which add to Official Competition’s meta qualities. Like his character Iván, Martinez is a veteran Argentine actor who works mostly in serious theatre. Banderas sometimes collaborates with Spanish filmmakers such as Pedro Almodóvar, but like Félix he’s a global star who often appears in big-budget Hollywood spectacles.

As Rivalry’s rivalry heats up, Iván wants to go deep into his character using careful preparation and decades of craft. For Félix, acting relies more on the glamorous surfaces of his celebrity persona. If he needs to cry, he uses menthol in his eyes. He doesn’t have to “imagine his dead grandmother,” as he says to Iván.

In the middle of all this alpha-male competition, we have Lola, who has a wonderful way of keeping the men — and the audience — off-balance. Cruz is a deadpan delight, as Lola’s unpredictable mix of creative anarchy and tyrannical micromanaging causes havoc.

Lola spends six hours looking at couch fabrics because the couch must express the taste of “an unrefined man who wants to be refined.” She devotes one whole rehearsal day to musing on “the void of the unforeseeable.” She sets up some truly insane trust exercises.

Duprat and Cohn are exploring and spoofing the cliché of the difficult, exacting genius, a trope made more interesting by the fact this genius happens to be a woman. (Lola herself is impatient about any assumptions you might make about that, though. Asked at a film fest presser whether her work is about challenging the patriarchy, she says she’s tired of art being “ideologically frisked.”)

Official Competition isn’t an ideological statement. It’s not an arthouse examination of the agony of the solitary artist, nor a sprawling multi-character indictment of the film industry as a whole. With its keen but forgiving eye for human weakness, its ardent love for movies and the people who make them, it is perhaps closest in spirit to last year’s wackadoo Nic Cage project The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

Eventually the storyline, which has been lollygagging around in a pleasant kind of way, takes a hard turn into eventfulness. This conclusion feels abrupt, but it can’t take away from the film’s essential charm, wit and weirdness.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca