No film by Almodóvar , oddly enough, is among the best in Europe to date. Or, at least, that is what emerges from the record, always debatable, of the European Film Awards . Twice, yes, and thanks to Come Back and Talk to her , she has been singled out as the most distinguished of directors in her year. And it even has an honorary prize for the entire race awarded in 2013. Well, pain and glory seems the one indicated to repair the wound. Up to four categories (screenplay, director, film and actor) the film starring Antonio Banderas is nominated, the most obvious of the favorites, as made public on Saturday morning at the European Film Festival. The gala and solution to the entanglement will take place in Berlin on December 7 .
Its most obvious rivals are two filmmakers with the obligatory vitola of masters: the Polish Roman Polanski and the Italian Marco Bellocchio . Rarely, the Academy chaired by Wim Wenders presented such a perfect and even universally indisputable list of favorites. The parallels, or laziness, as you look, have made all of them occupy the same lockers. The three aspire to be the best director , the three sign the best of the scripts and the three opt with their male interpreters to the statuette of Marras. Jean Dujardin is the protagonist of The officer and the spy , that of Polanski; and Pierfrancesco Favino occupies the same place in the credit titles of The Traitor , Bellocchio.
To continue with the coincidences, they all tell the story of a man who, after knowing the glory, approaches the end of life to, indeed, pain. The Polish tape recovers the famous Dreyfus case. We talked about the clearly anti-Semitic sentence that condemned the French army officer at the end of the 19th century and that Zola himself denounced in a milestone of what was previously called journalism . It does not escape anyone that Polanski himself is placed on the side of the accused in a film as balanced, tense and monumental as, everything is said, shameless. The Special Jury Prize went to the film in Venice.
The case of the traitor is different. Radically diverse. This time, the Italian tells the story of the regretful mobster Tommaso Buscetta and he does it with the bleeding and even cruel tone of the most cruel, worth the pompous epithet, of the masters. The film tells the chisel, and with the help of an immense Pierfrascesco Favino, the journey that goes from despair to the simplest moral act. Busceta was not a hero. He simply developed a survival instinct near the miraculous. And so on to become the greatest of traitors and the most necessary of men. Everything at once. The traitor always moves straight ahead. The violence is dry, without mannerisms. The result is an exploration to the deepest and most murky of the soul to draw the exact profile of issues such as fear, guilt, responsibility or much simpler horror.
And then there is Pain and glory , which is, as is well known, the most reflective, personal and illuminated of the tapes of an Almodóvar that looks in the mirror of Almodóvar to tear off the surface the most refined, faithful and deep portrait from all of us. It sounds tremendous and, indeed, it is. The image that is right to see through the last masterpiece of the director of La Mancha is that of an entire country (ours), at the same time that form and sense is given as rarely before the subject matter of memory , to the very stuff of cinema. That said, the most elementary of the ways to end a deficiency (the fact that no Almodóvar film appears in the European honorary list) is really deficient.
Otherwise, note that next to the three undisputed appear with three nominations The favorite , by Yorgos Lanthimos , and Portrait of a woman on fire , by Céline Sciamma . For the first one they are the candidacies to film, director and actress ( Olivia Colman ), and for the second, director, script and actress ( Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel ). It becomes rare, if not unfair, that Sciamma's dazzling work has been left out of the best production nominations. And even stranger than a 2018 film, not 2019, re-enter the list of awards: that happens to the favorite , who was already at the Oscars and that, in fact, Olivia Colman won it.
The rest of the films that qualify for the jackpot are 'Los miserables', by Ladj Ly (who is also a screenplay candidate), and System crasher , by Nora Fingscheidt (which also appears in the category of actresses by Helena Zengel) Good for the first, also debatable for the second.
So, and discarded Bong Joon Ho and his parasites for very little European, it is the turn of Pedro Almodóvar.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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