Last Tuesday I was lucky enough to get a ticket to the much adored Little White Lies/Grolsch free film screenings at the Soho Curzon. Previously they have played great films such as SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD, ANIMAL TOWN and THE KINGS SPEECH, but sadly this time the film was BIUTIFUL.
I went into the screening open minded as I had not heard much about the film and the trailer is very elusive when describing a clear narrative. So I didn’t know what to expect.
On the surface it is the story of a man, Uxbal (Javier Bardem, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN) who is trying to keep his and his family’s head above water in the overpopulated Barcelona. He is basically a single parent of a young son and daughter as their mother is bipolar and does nothing to quell the symptoms posing at times a danger to the people around her. For work he acts as a middle man between a gay Chinese sweatshop owner and the rest of Spain, making sure the rip off Gucci has sellers in the illegal, Senegalese and Nigerians, to making sure the local cops are paid off. Everything is dirty, stifling and corrupt. So as you can gather life’s not easy and to make matters worse he finds out that he is dying of cancer. Oh, nearly forgot, he can also see dead people.
To say that there is a lot going in this film is an understatement. Every sub plot is treated like the primary story whether it’s the family dealing with the mother’s mental instability or the sweatshop owner’s problem with dead illegal workers. Because of this the film seems overbearing and far to hectic for anyone to latch onto any particular story. The director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose previous films include, BABEL and 21 GRAMS, two multi-character films centred around one event such as a shooting in BABEL or a road death in 21 GRAMS, continues to use the same structure of these omnibus type films but only focusing on one character in Uxbal, and it doesn’t work in my opinion. The idea of all these events happening at the one time and not treating any like sub-plot does simulate real-life but in this it is convoluted. Since there is so much happening a lot of the ideas are not full explored which is a shame as much would work fantastically on their own. It appears that the director could not decide what to film for his next project and just stuck a lot of ideas together to see what would happen.
With the above causing major problems for the audience, possibly hindering their enjoy the film, there is actually a lot of good as well. The film is ‘biutifully’ shoot in a less chaotic, 24 style, from cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, BABEL). You can also not fault the acting as everyone in the film does an excellent job of elicit the appropriate response from the viewer, especially that of Ubxal’s wife, Maricel Álvarez. Also there are some very touching moments involving the children and Ubxal. The supernatural elements are very interesting, with having the ghosts of the recently deceased stuck to the ceiling which can be very unsettling.
So there is alot to like about the film and I’m sure will be very popular and I know my above argument for disliking the film is not the strongest but all I could think about while watching the film is how much I wanted to get out of the theatre.
BIUTIFUL comes out January 28th, the trailers below.
