Biutiful

Alejandro Iňárritu (pictured), director of 21 Grams and Babel, is back with Biutiful, a Barcelona-based tragic drama starring Javier Bardem. It's a study in ugliness that makes grim viewing, says Emma Rowley, but Bardem's portrayal of a man at odds with himself is a thing of beauty.

Biutiful is a difficult film to watch. Its unrelenting bleakness, where grim revelation follows grim revelation, is signalled in an early scene when Uxal (Javier Bardem) pisses blood into his dirty toilet. A fixer who arranges work for illegal immigrants, Uxal is a resident of Barcelona. But it's not the Barcelona familiar from postcards or visits. This is a city of back street factories, dilapidated high rise apartments and concrete basements. Every wall is water-stained, every ceiling's plaster peels with damp, the light coming in from each window is fractured by the layers of filth. After a while the unemitting ugliness starts to seem like an aesthetic system of its own, a grotesquerie that's reflected in a nightclub scene where the dancers wear fake breasts over their buttocks and on their heads; or in the mortuary where Uxal views his exhumed, embalmed father, dead for fifty years and whose corpse is simultaneously hideous and beautiful.

Uxal is married with two children but separated from his wife, Maramba (Marciel Alvarez), a manic depressive who cannot control her desire to sleep around (including an ongoing liaison with Uxal's brother Tito, played by Eduard Fernández) or the paranoid distrust of her five-year-old son that leads her to beat him for minor transgressions. When Uxal is diagnosed with cancer, he realises he must get his affairs in order and find a way to provide for his children.

His business interests include paying off the cops so they'll turn a blind eye to the Senegalese who sell fake designer bags on the street, and liaising with the management of the illegal factory whose Chinese workers make the bags. But he is not heartless, striving to improve the living conditions of the very people he is exploiting – although his efforts are at best inconsistent and at worst horribly misguided.

If this was all that writer/director Iňárritu was attempting, the film would be a harsh social document depicting the realities of life for migrant workers and the complex motivations of those who employ them. But the filmmaker gives it another twist with the fact that Uxal is a medium, able to speak to the recently dead and bring them peace – which he does for a fee. And in Iňárritu's film, Uxal's talent is genuine, as the spirits of the departed appear next to their corpses or float, trapped, against the ceiling. This decision muddies the message somewhat; so-called mediums being a pretty exploitative bunch in real-life, and the juxtaposition of these supernatural elements with the grim lives of the workers makes the latter feel like just so much local colour that has caught the director's eye. Consequently, a later scene, in which a fellow medium urges Uxal to ask forgiveness from the spirits of some people whose death he has inadvertently caused, appears shallow and hypocritical in the extreme.

The characters are equally problematic, ranging from unlikeable to appalling (and the better the performance, the more unlikeable the character), except for Uxal's children and two female workers (Diayatou Daff's Igé is one) with key roles but limited screen time. It falls to Bardem to bring some humanity to his portrayal of Uxal, which he does with some brilliance. It is hard to imagine what this film would have been without Bardem but he plays Uxal as a sympathetic and kind person, even when his actions are thoughtless and harmful. Bardem's performance must have been noted by the Cannes jurors and it's possible he may get a nod for his work. (This review was first published as part of our 2010 Cannes coverage: Bardem jointly won the festival's best actor award and has just been nominated for an Oscar for his performance.)

There is much to engage with in Iňárritu's latest offering but little to enjoy. There are two stories here: one of a man who is coming to terms with what it means to be a father, even as he is confronting his own mortality; and one about Europe's hidden black market economy and the workers trying to eke out a dangerous living. Unfortunately, the two strands destroy each other as the film progresses, the sensitive spirituality of one and its attendant symbolism (owls, snow, moths) appearing rather flimsy against the horrors of the other.

Rating on a scale of 5 owl hairballs: 2.5

Release date: UK: 28 January, 2011
Directed by: Alejandro Iňárritu
Written by: Alejandro Iňárritu
Cast: Javier Bardem, Marciel Alvarez, Eduard Fernández, Diayatou Daff, Chen Tai Shen, Luo Jin  
Rating: 15 
Running time (mins): 147

More on IndieMovies:
Read the latest movie news and movie reviews. Watch free movies on the site now.