For over 20 years, I’ve spent at least part of each week thinking about actors, but what they’re doing remains a mystery to me. Is great performance the result of technique, natural charisma, or a non-reproducible chemical reaction between talent and material? Are you playing the sublime feat of self-transformation, or are you just lying fantasy?
These questions are the playful film “Official” by the Argentine duo Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn about the filmmaking of three powerful Spanish-speaking actors doing a master class on their technical theory and practice. It will appear in the “Competition”.
The premise is that a wealthy businessman (Jose Luis Gomez), who felt blue on his 80th birthday, decided to fund the film as a way to extend his legacy. He buys the rights to the award-winning novel — he never cares to read it — and hires the award-winning director, Laura. One is a world-class star named Felix, who never meets the same girlfriend again and is always chased by the same sneaky assistant. Another Ivan is a theatrical man who is proud of his work as a teacher and his commitment to the highest principles of his wife and art for 28 years.
The most important thing to know about these people is that the director is Penelope Cruz, Antonio Banderas’ box office revenue, and the actors are actors. Oscar Martinez.. This is only partially typecast. Although Martinez’s fame does not extend to Banderas’ fame, he won the Best Acting Award at the 2016 Venice Film Festival. Cruz, along with many other talents, is a great comic performer. Laura She steps on the thin line between the crackpot and the visionary without losing sight of the character’s integrity. Her frizzy redhead cloud is itself a debate between inspiration and madness.
Laura is also the coach, referee and spectator of the cage match between Ivan and Felix. Felix cannot despise professional respect for each other. Ivan, like Method Man, believes his job is to delve into the soul of the person he is impersonating and find the psychological truth that can be conveyed to the audience. Felix is like Hit Your Mark, Say Your Line, Collect Your Paycheck. Which is better? The “Official Competition” lies between contrasting approaches, but it is also an ego and self-image contest.
Laura covers them with eggs, loses balance, and rehearses all at once under a huge rock suspended from a crane. Her own aesthetic agenda is a bit puzzling, but at least in the rehearsals we witness, she can get results. The actual quarters of the “Official Competition”, Dupra and Korn, are much more relaxed, keeping everything on a calm and unobtrusive farce pitch and receiving some strong emotional eruptions.
After all, this is a movie of one joke, a hairy dog metanarrative, but not a bad joke. The production seems to have taken place during a period of relatively strict pandemic restrictions. This can be seen in cave-like sets, sparsely populated scenes, and social distances between actors. Austerity has its advantages. Busy behind-the-scenes comedies may not have been able to provide such an in-depth study of actors at work, or such a dry and rigorous anatomy of what they are doing.
Felix and Ivan, yes, but also Banderas, Martinez, Cruz. Banderas can be surprisingly subtle, influential and magnetic when he feels that way. It’s almost sneaky for a very beautiful person to have such skills, and you may have to go back in time — Gary CooperSay — To find a second actor with an equivalent gift.
This does not declare Banderas the winner. Felix practices Oscar’s rejection speech when he thinks no one is watching, arguing that art is not a competition, and he has a point. Otherwise you would have to be an cynic to believe. But when it comes to movies and acting, cynicism is part of the fun.
Official tournament
It was rated as R. Great acting and bad behavior. Spanish, with subtitles. Execution time: 1 hour 54 minutes. At the theater.