REALITY ENDS WHERE FICTION BEGINS
Official Competition swivels its lens onto the film industry, with unexpected results
Official Competition, a Spanish-language comedy from Argentine co-writers and directors Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, seems like it was created by people with an intimate understanding of how movies get made. And if that's true, then I never want to visit a film set again. It's too freaking dangerous!
Penélope Cruz stars as Lola Cuevas, a famous director whose fiery temperament is matched by an explosion of red locks.
I've seen films that lean into Cruz's beauty, those that try to hide it and some that just ignore it, but I've never seen her like this. It's a refreshingly creative role for the talented actress.
Lola is hired by a wealthy businessman who wants her to adapt an acclaimed novel for which he's just purchased the rights. Even at their first meeting, he admits he hasn't read it.
Undaunted, she decides to hire two diametrically different actors to play two brothers in the film. One of them is Félix, played by Antonio Banderas as a souped-up version of his own movie-star self. The other is Iván (Oscar Martínez) a lesser-known character actor with a background in theatre.
They arrive with their own rituals and superstitions and immediately begin jousting for on-set supremacy.
But rather than dissuade this posturing, Lola plays into it with mind games like having the two men rehearse under a giant boulder slung precariously beneath a crane. And you wonder why movies go over budget.
The comedy often comes at you from odd angles. The scene of Lola explaining to her patron the plot of the book he never bothered to read is somehow heightened by having him eat a ludicrously large serving of ice cream during the conversation.
Then there's a screen test with the benefactor's daughter, in which an unexpected third party proves to have better chemistry with her than either of the preening actors.
Official Competition has played at festivals both large ( Venice, Toronto) and small (Blue Mountain, Ont., where I managed to catch it).
Its dark humour might be best suited to that rarefied fest-mosphere, but the film should still manage to find fans at the multiplex who are looking for something a little meta, a little subtitled and a little rough. Lights, camera —