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Said

Marlon Brando

that an actor is a person who only participates in a conversation if you

try it. Actually, if you look closely, an actor is a wildly extreme version of any other artist. And, hurrying, from any of us. Anyone who dedicates himself to art depends on the judgment of others, but an interpreter is in his essence nothing more than that: the embodiment of a judgment.

His work is he.

Each of his characters has the same hair, identical gaits and exactly the drop of shoulders that his mother gave him at birth.

'Official competition'

, which is not by chance the most prominent film on Saturday in (said with an Argentine touch) official competition of the Mostra, talks about all that: the sense of acting, egos, the vanity market and, the most important, the cinema. Let's say it was coming. It has been a little over a decade since the Argentines

Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn

have been thinking about the fraudulentness of art from a particular sense of comedy that more than simple parody is an

analysis of customs and even

uninhibited

'

performance

'

. Until now they had analyzed the visual arts (

'The artist'

or

'My masterpiece')

, literature (

'Illustrious citizen'

) and even architecture (

'The man next door'

). He played the movies.

But for this and since it is the same cinema, since they make films (not paintings, books or houses), they needed the help of actors willing to disembowel the miseries, traps and perhaps frauds of their profession. I mean, proud of gutting themselves. And this is where the surprise appears and we witness the greatest achievement of

'Official Competition'

, you saw, in official competition. Seeing

Penelope Cruz, Antonio Banderas and Óscar Martínez

(them and not others) exercise on themselves, in addition to being very morbid, generates above all the unusual spectacle of a double or triple nude.

If acting is somehow undressing, acting on the act is, make no mistake about it, doing it squared or, given that there are three of them, cubed.

We have arrived.

The film tells the adventure of a film director played by Cruz who is commissioned, as it could not be less, a masterpiece.

For this, it will have the participation of the most popular (Banderas) and the most prestigious (Martínez) of the actors on the planet.

What emerges is not only a delusional and very funny commentary on the hazards of the film industry but, better still, an ingenious mechanism in which the one questioned, in addition to the seventh art, is the spectator himself, whatever he does. .

The ego, which is what it is all about, is as universal as the asses: everyone, whether or not they have Instagram, has one.

And there are those who look very fat (the ego and the ass).

Penelope Cruz in an image from 'Official Competition'.

Gastón Duprat says that does not tolerate

the

liberals

who feel "that moral superiority over the rest."

He says it for the actors, of course. The director maintains that he is disgusted by those interpreters who believe they are doing something so important "that they are convinced that the public will not understand it." Beside him, the screenwriter Andrés Duprat does not hurt to admit that fraud, in the best sense, is good and indispensable for art. "Being vain and selfish is what makes artists go where the common do not go," he says. Not far away, Martínez maintains that without ego there would be no movies or books, or even political ones. "Of course, you have to master it," he says. Penelope points to this thesis and illustrates it with a kind of fable worthy of the Little Prince:

"Vanity is a wild animal that you have to tame."

And he continues: "An actor lives by looking at others. If you only look at yourself, bad." Banderas agrees, but very cautious: "You have to put the ego in a safe. As soon as it appears, it makes it impossible for you."

Actually, all the comments above are chemical elements of the air that the film breathes. There are highly toxic particles, perhaps tragic, but also enough doses of oxygen and helium gas so that it never stops being comedy with all the consequences.

The delirium of deceptions in which the actors get lost in the film, while giving life to characters that are not, ends up creating a dazzling game of mirrors where the gaze enjoys losing itself.

Who is speaking on the screen? The Banderas, Cruz or Martínez that we know from their previous films and the brilliance of the fame that precedes them, their characters or the lies interpreted by the latter? It is a labyrinth with the same evidence as nonsense; it is false because it cannot be more than true. And so.

[By the way, two mental notes. Taking into account that Penelope Cruz shines in

Almodóvar's '

Parallel Mothers

' as few times before and does it again in the opposite register (literally disheveled) here, her Volpi Cup seems inevitable. On the other hand,

Irene Escolar's

brief intervention

is a gift.

Huge and barely opening your mouth. Or yes, opening it, but not to speak. I understand myself.]

The directors' strategy in the staging consists of stripping even more (and we are already on the fourth or fifth nude). The entire film takes place on a kind of concrete and glass stage with clean and huge walls where the performers rehearse. The idea is that they are seen precisely rehearsing without cuts or interruptions:

they got into their role in a way as elemental as, again, clean of clothes.

And all with a single purpose: to show their ass, which is also their ego. Shiny.

One of the characters in '

My Masterpiece

', the directors' previous film, said that to be a successful artist "you have to be ambitious and selfish. Anyone

who makes art because they don't know how to do anything else has a kind of disability."

And he added: "I am the perfect example of what I just said: I do something perfectly useless and that also does not interest anyone."

The latter does not affect us all;

but the first thing, yes.

What has been said:

'Official

competition

'

in official competition '.

That exceptionally '

zonzo

'.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Penelope Cruz

  • Pedro Almodovar

  • Instagram

  • Antonio Banderas

  • cinema

  • culture

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