REVIEW: Biutiful

AMAZING GRACE

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is one of the most exciting talents on the world cinema scene today. Amores Perros was enough to give him a cult following, and he topped it up with 21 Grams and Babel.

His latest Biutiful comes in a blaze of glory, including an Oscar nomination this year.  His star Javier Bardem, has also won a Best Actor nomination. Biutiful is the kind of complex film about a character not easy to pin  -- it weaves together to many strands in the protagonist’s life, has so much to say about contemporary urban life (it is set in Barcelona, but the ugliness, decay and violence could very well be Mumbai).

Bardem is an actor who can embody all those complexities, since his face is thuggish and eyes angelic. He is magical to watch on screen (even in a silly film like Eat Pray Love). The camera loves him, and Inarritu paints a vivid picture of anguish and strength with that face, that can portray pain without demeaning the suffering of the man.

Uxbal (Bardem) is a small time criminal with more problems than it is humanly possible to endure, His wife is half crazy and bipolar (Maricel Álvarez -- outstanding), he has two kids to look after, plus he is terminally ill and needs money so that his kids will be looked after when he is dead.

Uxbal runs a racket in cheap illegal labour that produces imitations of branded goods.  But he is a good man, who actually cares for the sweat shop workers he supplies and that ends in tragedy.  He also has a strange power that allows him to communicate with the dead. The audience cannot but help caring too, for this rugged yet tender man, who deserves a better life.

The squalor of the city and Uxbal’s life is shot and depicted with a kind of compassion that removes all melodrama from it, and makes the character’s troubles almost ennobling. If the director had let go even for a minute, the film could easily have turned into pure hokum, the fact that it doesn’t has a lot to do with Bardem’s performance.

It’s a long film and irrevocably dark, but so fascinating that you can’t escape its grip.