Licking against the pricks

How many times in the history of the medium have we seen a single film rattle as many socio-cinematic paradigms—and done it with as much bio—as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)? Scripted by Hanif Kureishi—his first film credit—and directed by Stephen Frears, this incendiary entertainment made movie stars of London’s teeming South Asian community, featured a central romance that was both interracial and gay, and embraced the tenants of Thatcherite hyper-capitalism only to expose it as fundamentally corrupting and ineffectual with regards to the populace at large. Yet at no point does the film draw attention to its importance or iconoclasm. In one of the excellent supplements contained on Criterion’s new DVD and BD releases of My Beautiful Laundrette Frears claims that he initially didn’t really notice the fact that the story was queer. The film feels so utterly focued on story, character development and milieu that I’m inclined to believe him.

My Beautiful Laundrette begins with second-generation Anglo-Pakistani Omar (Gordon Warnecke) essentially trading in his former socialist journalist father, Hussein (Roshan Seth), a man seemingly broken by emigration, for his businessman uncle, Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey), a man eager to assimilate—complete with white mistress—and capitalize on every carrot of opportunity life in Britain dangles before him. “You have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system,” Nasser insists, and Omar is an apt pupil, rapidly going from washing cars in a garage to refurbishing a dilapidated old laundromat in a predominantly Asian South London nieghbourhood. Omar does this with the assistance of a lanky white working-class factotum named Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis in his breakout role), who along the way becomes Omar’s lover, a development which seems perfectly natural—though its not to interfere with Omar’s single-minded fixation on making lots of money. Homophobia takes a backseat to racism in any case, with the local white thugs threatening Johnny simply for accepting a brown man as his employer. Eventually, in a sequence Frears stages like a late western, those thugs launch a vicious attack on the whole lot of them, making for a ugly climax—though that’s not the end of the story.

So few films had previously plunged a mainstream audience in what was until then an all but invisible immigrant community, with its own rules and ideals and wild contrasts. My Beautiful Laudrette launched a new wave of Asian-centered British films, not to mention Kureishi’s career—he would go on to script Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), My Son the Fanatic (1997), The Mother (2003) and Venus (2006), continuing a thread not only of immigrant representation but sexually audacity. Frears would begin a winning streak that would peak with The Grifters (1990) and Day-Lewis, having emulated Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood here, would become like them a star of the first order, known for transforming himself through methody immersion in vocal and body work. Though one could argue that the greatest moments throughout the rest of Day-Lewis’ career, from Christy Brown to Lincoln, are only ever on par with that delicious furtive lick of Omar’s neck, a gesture Criterion has fittingly placed right on the cover of its superb new package.

                 

Best of 2014: The Immigrant

Melodrama and mood piece, character(s) study and historical, James Gray’s The Immigrant presents us with types that turn into richly complex individuals and narrative tropes that transform into peculiar tales possessing both the broad strokes of myth and miniature movements of lived experience.

Set in New York in the early 1920s, the film introduces us to Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cotillard) just as she and her sister Magda arrive at Ellis Island after a gruelling journey from their Polish homeland. Magda is diagnosed with tuberculosis, Ewa is labeled a “woman of low morals” for unspecified events rumoured to have taken place en route from Europe, and the sisters are unceremoniously separated. Magda cannot escape mandatory quarantine, but Ewa evades deportation thanks to a shady saviour by the name of Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix). Bruno tells Ewa he works with an immigrant assistance organization; he actually manages a basement burlesque show and pimps out his performers, whom he houses in cramped apartments filled with yellowing lace and dappled mirrors. Ewa and Bruno’s relationship is driven by exploitation and childish ardour, desperation and stubborn optimism, or mere stubbornness, or the stubbornness that emerges out of a need to survive and to negotiate what exactly is survival.

The Immigrant’s third central character, an illusionist dubbed Orlando (Jeremy Renner), doesn’t enter the picture until its midpoint. In a film refreshingly devoid of irony, there’s something fascinating about the fact that the only man in the movie who doesn’t seem full of shit is the one who fools people for a living. Orlando is Bruno’s cousin, both sons of immigrants. They are old rivals, which feeds into what promises to become a love triangle, though this plot twist too is subverted.

Written by Gray and Richard Menello, The Immigrant is heavy on incident but grounded in character and performance. Cotillard has never been better, using languages and cadences to convey varying levels of deceit and desire. Renner, moustachioed and magnetic, echoes the grace and charismatic duplicity of James Cagney. Phoenix, in his fourth collaboration with Gray (following The Yards, Two Lovers and We Own the Night), is tremendously vulnerable without being ingratiating. His Bruno is a scoundrel, but he’s also struggling to make sense of the nagging compassion swelling in him. As the film moves toward its conclusion he somehow emerges as the most transformed and even tragic figure. This is one of the film’s masterstrokes, the way glimmers of moral fortitude are passed from one character to another.

                               

No separation

Where Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation chronicled the disintegration of a marriage, The Past, the Iranian writer-director’s follow-up, begins four years after the marriage of its central characters has ended. In the instantly transfixing opening sequence Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) and Marie (Bérénice Bejo) find each other on either side of an immense pane of glass, gesturing, mouthing words, neither of them audible to the other or to us. Ahmad has flown to Paris from Tehran to finalize the divorce. Marie comes to fetch Ahmad from the airport in a borrowed car—borrowed from whom she won’t say, though the dry cleaning dangling in the back is conspicuous. This soon-to-be ex-couple are pleasant with each other, all grievances presumably having lost their venom years ago. Indeed, the complicated yet completely coherent drama about to unfold is generated not from tensions between Ahmad and Marie but from within a larger circle of characters, all of whom, whether children or adults, present or absent, are somehow ensnared in the powerful force that gives the film its title. 

Marie drives Ahmad to her home—his former home—where he finds in her backyard two children, one being the youngest of Marie’s daughters from another relationship, the other being a little boy Ahmad has never met. During the first third or so of The Past Farhadi is careful not to rush exposition, focusing neither on explaining the past or foreshadowing the future, and instead living fully in the moment. He knows that everything to come will carry more weight after we’ve done some of our own detective work, spent time coming to know these characters in a more organic method. Marie’s home, for example, is cluttered and wears layers of varied inhabitants. Messes have meaning, as does the dynamic between she and that temperamental little boy. Let’s not get too precious about spoilers: that boy is the son of Marie’s new partner, Samir (A Prophet’s Tahar Rahim), who Marie wants to marry, thus the sudden urge to sign papers. Marie hasn’t informed Ahmad of the details of her current situation, though the reasons for her continual withholding grow only more complex as the story continues. Marie’s teenage daughter Lucie (Pauline Burlet) disapproves of her mother’s new relationship so vehemently that she refuses to come home. Is this simply a matter of Lucie’s unwillingness to allow an intruder into her already broken family? Is there something more at stake? 

I fear that if I overemphasize the immaculate structuring of The Past I’ll give the impression that it’s been dramaturged within an inch of its life—nothing could be farther from the truth. Farhadi simply excels at character and plot development to a degree that’s extremely rare in adult, intellectually sophisticated, emotionally resonant drama. Some of what’s revealed here is devastating, yet by the time such revelations arise we’ve beheld a boggling geometry of allegiances and have cause to feel such investment in every character that it becomes impossible to delineate who’s supposed to be villain, who hero. This is a moral tale in the most modern sense, by which I mean there’s no moral to be surmised, only recognized, worked through, considered. And while Farhadi’s style is relatively straightforward and chronological, utilizing hard cuts, no score and brilliant naturalistic performances, there is something about his approach to working through moral quandaries that, like the mysterious scenes that open and close The Past, recall the films of Kieślowski. Which is meant as a high compliment. 

            

Rhapsodie bohémien

Aki Kaurismäki wanted to adapt Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème since first reading it in the ’70s, but it would be another 15 years before the Finnish filmmaker could realize his dream in the only city that could possibly host Murger’s iconic narrative. Except that it couldn’t. Paris was no longer the Paris of 1851, or even 1951. Café culture was a memory. So Kaurismäki moved his crew to the southern suburb of Malakoff, which held traces of his dimmer, more decrepit vision of the city of light. He shot in sterling black and white, which leaves more room to dream, and has a way of blurring our sense of time. La vie de bohème (1992) is one of Kaurismäki’s most transporting and wondrous works, characteristically economical and deadpan, yet brimming with emotion and drama, with fatalism, snap decisions, love at first sight, and hastily forged alliances. It’s funny, inventive, occasionally absurd, peppered with deus ex machina yet tragic, devoted to an idea of life, art and romance that leaves no room for failure, even when failure is inevitable. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion.

The cast is a dream. Matti Pellonpää plays Rodolfo, an Albanian painter, and Kari Väänänen is Schaunard, an Irish composer of vaudevillian musique concrete. (These Fins knew not a lick of the French and thus learned their lines phonetically.) André Wilms is the logorrhetic writer Marcel Marx, a character Wilms would revisit in Kaurismäki’s Le Havre (2011). Evelyne Didi plays Mimi, who loves Rodolfo but finds it hard to bear his endemic poverty. (And it should be said that, in just a few scenes, Kaurismäki and his collaborators do more to dignify and deepen the women in this chronicle of male-centric bohemian life than every Beat Generation movie combined.) Jean-Pierre Léaud, beloved star of so much early Truffaut and Godard, plays Rodolfo’s affluent patron, an impulsive art collector who materializes like a gruff angel at just the right moments. There are cameos from directors Sam Fuller, whose Pick-up on South Street (1953) is alluded to during a pickpocketing scene, and Louis Malle, playing a diner who takes pity on Rodolfo after said pocket has been picked. The film also features Laika, a dog, in the role of Baudelaire, also a dog. Which is to say that a dog plays a dog, one named after a poet and contemporary of Murger’s. He does a marvellous job.

La vie de bohème seems timeless, yet part of its charm derives from its precise sense of place, one where shadows are many and long, where the wallpaper’s peeling in every garret and berets are worn without irony, where a two-headed trout smiles upon the foundation of a friendship, where the wipers of a three-wheeled car wipe in time to Little Willie John when lovers reunite. Magic and squalor are close neighbours in this world, as they were in the production: when Kaurismäki couldn’t afford to shoot a farewell scene in the Gare d'Austerlitz, he found an aluminium garage door and projected light on it through a stencil cut to resemble the windows of a moving train. And real-life concerns creep into the fantasy. Typically for Kaurismäki, immigrant communities, outsiders and the poor stick together without making a big deal of it. Solidarity is as much a matter of survival as sentiment. But it can’t save these bohemians from their destinies. Nor has it saved Kaurismäki from the brutalities of film financing. In the first ten years of his career he made 12 features. In the last ten, he’s made two. C’est la vie? Here’s hoping that the prospects for this one-of-a-kind filmmaker aren’t as dismal as they were for Rodolfo, Schaunard, Mimi or Marcel. 

                            

Action movies

A boy, working at a garage, does a favour for an elderly woman, and steals her wallet. A young woman discovers she’s going to lose her factory job and physically assaults her employer in protest. In both cases the characters are followed by the camera as though in hot pursuit—the word “dogged” always comes to mind. The camera is handheld but there’s no phony, pseudo-documentary shakiness. The décors and mise en scène are unadorned as can be, the close-ups often bracingly tight and off-kilter. Yet there is a sense of masterful control to how every moment unfolds, and the result is moment-to-moment riveting. The characters always have tasks, and the stakes are high.

The boy, Igor (Jérémie Renier), has been pulled out of school to work at the garage, but his father (Olivier Gourmet) winds up pulling him out of the garage too, so that he can focus his energies on assisting him with the maintenance of illegal migrant workers, one of whom falls prey to an accident and before perishing asks Igor to make him a promise, one which breaks through the boy’s preternatural cynicism. The girl, Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne), lives with her alcoholic mother in a trailer and is desperate to improve her situation, to have a normal life, above all, a job, something she seeks with a tremendous fierceness. Her energy seems uncontainable: in a single breathless sequence, we see her confront her mother’s lover, steal the bottle he’s brought along with him, smash the bottle, get chased by the boyfriend through the trailer park, then spot a guy on a dirt bike, tackle him to the ground and start to wrestle. It’s almost an action movie.

But let me clarify: the boy and the girl are in two different movies, the first being La promesse, the second Rosetta. But these films are connected by a strict yet liberating formal, narrative and, yes, moral rigour of the highest order. These films, the first made in 1996, the second in 1999, both new on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, represent a genuine revelation, not only for Belgium’s fraternal filmmaking collaborators Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who had made documentaries before producing two disappointing fiction films and needed to find a new, essentially sui generis way of working, but for cinema itself: they launched a body of work both radical and humble, austere and galvanizing. Each movie begins in media res, offers no exposition, no score, nothing beyond the diegetic; each demonstrates relationships only through action, and follows its protagonist with a rough and tumble loyalty that ultimately feels like the closest thing to true, deeper love that the movies can give us. The plights of Igor and of Rosetta are indeed dire, but the last thing these films want is to wallow in pity, and the stunning lead performances do nothing to ingratiate themselves. They crackle, they plunge, they examine—they move (in both senses of the word). The Dardennes won the Palme d’Or for Rosetta and would get another for L’enfant in 2005. Perhaps they’ll win another, because, since La promesse, theirs is also one of the most consistent bodies of work in cinema, and even if you were to peg them as having a formula, the work remains fresh because there is something in that formula that cannot help but come alive every time out: a pure, durable curiosity and belief in the power and the will of the underdog. 

Images '12: Desolation spectacle poetry history

The music, made of a single voice and some stringed instrument I can’t place, is as desolate as the wintry landscapes. And those landscapes are pretty damned desolate. (Alaskan landscapes, as it turns out, though they could be, are meant to be, anywhere cold and vast and glorious and terrifying.) These places are offered to us via portentous push-ins, the eeriness completed by the solitary figures standing within them, dwarfed by them, figures wearing snorkeled parkas so that the person inside could be any race or gender, everymen, epic-men, either very still, beholding the place, entranced, or walking toward us, boldly, perhaps ready to conquer. But mostly their backs are turned, and this itself is a tip-off, something that speaks of a certain relationship to camera, to power, to the gaze. This confrontation-by-refusal technique has been used before, its intention made more explicit, in previous work from filmmaker and installation artist John Akomfrah, who was born in Ghana, raised in the UK, developed his body of work as part of the Black Audio Film Collective, and tells stories about immigrant experience.

The Nine Muses, last night’s opening gala of the 2012 Images Festival here in Toronto, is Akomfrah’s most recent film, an audio-visual palimpsest of: 1. Archival footage collage of African, Caribbean and South Asians in Britain in the 1950s and ’60s, working, walking, speaking, singing, and, in a particularly memorable moment, regarding—with back to the camera—a brick wall upon which “KEEP BRITAIN WHITE” has been spray-painted, 2. Readings of canonical texts from Western literature, everything from Dante to Shakespeare to Homer to Joyce to Beckett to Milton, being read by disembodied voices, among them Richard Burton and Michael Sheen, 3. Music, original music by Trevor Mathison and, as I recall, Wagner and Part, and 4. Those desolate wintry landscapes, along with other less desolate or at least more industrialized landscapes, presumably in England, where a black man sits, hides, contemplates, looks back at the camera... Am I forgetting something? Probably. The film pulls you into its undertow and washes over you as much as it pricks your critical faculties, your emotions and memories. All these elements coalesce to form a film-monument to the struggle of the Other, the push/pull of assimilation and assertion.

 

John Akomfrah on stage at The Royal, last night

“You get settled,” one of the on-screen figures in the archival footage tells us, “then you become part of the strangeness.”  I think the speaker may be someone famous or important. I apologize for not being able to tell you who it was, but to be honest if one really wants to absorb the full force of all detail that’s contained in The Nine Muses a hefty volume of footnotes would be required. But this density, even when opaque, holds its own sway. Who are we to think we can take all this in? The film is an experience, a force of nature. It’s mythical, epic, and not easily digestible. Though Akomfrah’s Q&A with TIFF Artistic Director and one-time Images programmer Cameron Bailey—the pair are old friends—went a long way toward unpacking it. All in all, a truly impressive beginning to the 25^th installment of this remarkable event. But much, much more is to come, including work from James Benning, Ben Rivers, and… Yo La Tengo! 

Le Havre: waylaid in Normandy

Two shoeshiners, one French (André Wilms), the other a Vietnamese pretending to be Chinese (Quoc Dung Nguyen), stand together, scanning the passage of feet along the station floor, seeking to ply their trade. A man, his mouth like a hatchet wound, his hand cuffed to a suitcase, presents his right loafer for service, but soon he’s spotted by some other, equally suspicious-looking men. He runs, they chase, there’s gunfire. Another one bites the dust. The shoeshiners don’t even sigh. Clearly, it’s a dangerous world, one fraught with real, nasty, morally repugnant crimes... as well as crimes of a far more ambiguous nature.

Marcel Marx, the French shoeshiner, has been around; he once was a bohemian in Paris, or so he says, but now ekes out a humble but contented existence and comes home every night to a devoted wife and a very cute dog. Soon the wife will be hospitalized with cancer and in her place will appear an African boy named Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), whose clandestine journey by shipping container to the UK got interrupted and is now on the run in this forgotten French port city. Marcel can do nothing about his beloved’s illness but at least he can try to help the boy from harm’s way and secure his safe passage to London, where his mom works illegally in a Chinese laundry (but at least she works). Steering clear of the authorities, the enigmatic and ever-present Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) especially, and shelling out for human smuggling costs won’t be easy, but our aging hero is determined and, just as importantly, unafraid to ask for help. “I’m not alone,” says Marcel. “I have friends.”

In his return to France (he made La Vie de Bohème there in 1992), Finnish wrier/director Aki Kaurismäki didn’t come alone either; he brought along Kati Outinen, star of eight previous Kaurismäkis and thus a sort of talisman, to play Marcel’s dear Arletty (named after the star of France’s beloved Les enfants du paradis), and bring a boldness and assurance to the film’s more problematic role. (Arletty’s wifely devotion, her refusal to even admit that she’s dying so that she can keep ironing Marcel’s clothes, cooking Marcel’s meals and managing Marcel’s paltry finances for as long as possible, can be a little hard to take; Le Havre’s Marxist cred is pretty impeccable, its feminist cred not so much.)

Both a love letter to French cinema and a letter bomb addressed to France’s xenophobic immigration policy makers, Le Havre, named for the Normandy city in which it’s set (which also happens to be the penultimate stop made by the sailors in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante), brings Kaurismäki’s ongoing exploration of working class solidarity back to foreign shores, resulting in one of his finest, most affectionate, and probably most crowd-pleasing films. To be sure, Le Havre feels like a summation rather than any sort of renovation of Kaurismäki’s 30-year career, examining familiar themes and tropes—yep, there’s a rock and roll show, this one featuring the vocal stylings of Little Bob—and firmly grounding itself in that distinctive deadpan-melodrama, Bresson-does-Buster Keaton approach that filmgoers will recognize as Kaurismäki’s trademark. Yet for all that, the film feels very much alive, engaged and enraged, full of ragged but persistent hope, less resting on laurels than shaking them back to life. And in the truly remarkable scenes that find Kaurismäki's camera calmly fixing itself upon the faces of the (often real-life) undocumented foreigners, imposing nothing, we sense that no matter how persistently mannered this filmmaker's approach may be, he remains alert to the world, and allows his subjects their dignity, their chance to simply be present for his camera and for all of us around the world watching their faces, and hopefully wondering about their fate.

"Getting lost doesn't help creativity at all": Javier Bardem and Alejandro González Iñárritu on their Biutiful collaboration

“The movie is like a Francis Bacon painting,” Javier Bardem says when asked to characterize Biutiful, the film in which he portrays a dying man who communicates with the recently dead while moving through a crime-ridden contemporary Barcelona that itself resembles some outer circle of the inferno. “Some people can take it. Some can’t. Some people can look at the surface and then go deeper to see the love beneath, the compassion that’s woven into the horror of life.”

Babel

Biutiful is the fourth feature from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Following his alternately acclaimed and denounced tripartite, “globalized” drama Babel, Biutiful is most closely related in ontological terms to González Iñárritu’s second feature 21 Grams. It’s his first movie in his native Spanish since his exhilarating multi-narrative debut Amores Perros. It’s also the first he’s made without screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. When González Iñárritu and Arriaga inamicably parted ways after fighting over credits for Babel, I wondered if their individual subsequent films would indicate which of them was responsible for the heavy-handedness and dependency on dramatic irony that increasingly plagued their collaborations. But both Biutiful and Arriaga’s recent directorial debut The Burning Plain make clear that the tendency was mutual. There are numerous moments in Biutiful that possess a certain penetrating eloquence, but they’re set within an at times oppressive framework far too eager to declare its self-importance, too proud of its fitfully successful attempts to say something meaningful about “the world we live in” generally, and the world of illegal migrant laborers specifically.

What makes Biutiful essential viewing then isn’t its socially burdened narrative or its ostentatious, immaculately crafted mise en scène—it’s Bardem’s impossibly rich, marathon central performance, and the way that performance is nurtured and heightened by González Iñárritu's precision approach. The shoot took place over five months, and as we watch Bardem’s flawed hero, Uxbal, wither away from the cancer that’s rapidly consuming him, while frantically trying to leave his children in the best possible position to continue in his absence, we’re watching a performance so immersive, so exhaustive, so rife with resonant contradictions, that by the end we can’t but feel we know this man somehow. We know he’s sick when the other characters don’t. We know his fateful errors in judgment and his efforts to do good. We witness his conferences with the dead, though Bardem never plays the supernatural bits any differently than the ones where he’s collecting money or feeding his kids. Uxbal clings to life while desperately maintaining some essential dignity, and when he’s finally forced to let go the loss is almost palpable in a way that the movie’s poetic intimations of an afterlife can’t diminish.

González Iñárritu and Bardem were promoting Biutiful during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival. We meet them in hotel rooms, separately, as though we’re interrogating them, hoping to pit one against the other in a ploy to get good copy. But despite the fact that the more divisive aspects of Biutiful could be regarded as representing a battle between Bardem’s deeply felt movie and González Iñárritu’s somewhat forced one, between an Oscar-nominated performance viewers are inclined to surrender to and a ruthlessly sculpted directorial vision some will be annoyed by, both artists make clear from the get-go that Biutiful is the result of a much-desired alliance. Bardem wanted to work with González Iñárritu, particularly for the way he works with actors, and González Iñárritu wanted to work with Bardem. The role of Uxbal, father to two children, husband to a woman suffering flamboyantly from bipolar disorder, and a sort of managerial figure for numerous underworld enterprises, was based to some extent on González Iñárritu’s own father, but written specifically for Bardem to interpret.

“Javier’s physically very strong,” explains González Iñárritu, “but, after having known him for eight or nine years, I know how delicate and sensitive he is on the inside. This Minotaur’s face of his envelops a poet’s soul. It’s a strange combination that attaches itself nicely to Uxbal, who’s a tough guy, a street guy, but at bottom is a vulnerable, sophisticated spirit. Primitive culturally, but spiritually sophisticated.”

When told about González Iñárritu’s assessment of his persona, Bardem considers this for a moment. “Tough on the outside and tender on the inside…” he says. “Like a melon!” We all laugh. “Melon Brando!” he then quips, and we laugh even harder. He immediately apologizes for the bad pun, but his ease and warmth loosens up the whole room. Bardem draws a curtain, pours himself some water, sits with us, rather than before us. He seems happy and relaxed, yet he’s frank with regards to the movie’s bleakness.

“Alejandro told me from the beginning that this was a tragedy,” says Bardem. “Like a Greek tragedy, where the gods enter the story in order to remind human beings how weak they are, how much help they need, and how little help they’re going to provide, because they have to learn by themselves.”

We discuss González Iñárritu’s infamous perfectionism, his habit of doing dozens of takes for every camera set-up. Bardem claims that while this approach can be draining it always led him to the best results. I tell Bardem that for all the scenes of intense drama, for me the most memorable was one where Uxbal openly confesses his terminal illness to a complete stranger in a noisy nightclub. The scene is moving because, in a sense, Bardem seems to just throw the line away, making nothing of it. Bardem, whose performances in Before Night Falls and The Sea Inside have already made him an old hand at on-screen death, points out however that even that scene was the product of countless takes and varying approaches. His performance only appears casual. But Bardem also acknowledges the importance of balancing lightness and weight when telling a story such as this, and credits his junior costars with helping him to map out his character’s degrees of gravity, as well as shake it all off when the workday is over.

“Alejandro didn’t want the kids to feel they were witnessing something real, something they’re going to bring home with them,” Bardem explains. “Everything was a game. Those kids would play their emotions and when he says cut they’d go back to their toys and do goofy things. That’s the way it has to be. You have to learn to detach yourself from the material at some points or you get lost in your own thing, and getting lost doesn’t help creativity at all. Some days were harder than others, but through the kids I learned how to go back to the days when I’d be playing a galaxy warrior one moment and then have to go home or off to class the next. I didn’t have to say to myself, ‘Hold on, I was just a galaxy warrior, how am I going to focus on the mathematics now?’ No. You jump. That’s what it’s all about. Be there, experience what you have to experience, but leave a little room in your brain where you tell yourself this is fiction.”

Death looms over every scene of Biutiful. It comes for Uxbal and it comes for many other characters too, especially those surviving on the fringes of the society. Death is finally the central theme of Biutiful: how to accept it, to prepare for it, to reconcile oneself to its mysteries—though it’s slightly less mysterious for the likes of Uxbal than it is for most of us. We see Uxbal in a wintry forest, a place resembling this world yet clearly not of it, a place where he meets someone from his past, someone long gone. Uxbal’s connection to an afterlife is no mere fantastic construct for González Iñárritu. It’s inspired by the director’s own experience with people who he feels possess a genuine ability to see things most of us don’t, things hidden from the established senses. As González Iñárritu sits perched on his chair, trying to come to terms with our questions about what drove him to make Biutiful, there’s an undeniable feeling that his encounters with such people humbled him, and are meant to endow the work not with despair but rather with a sense of wonder.

“The character of Uxbal’s spiritual advisor, or mentor, was based on a woman I met in a very rundown neighbourhood in Mexico City,” González Iñárritu explains. “It was cold out, and I was wearing all these layers, these sweaters and coats and scarves, so you couldn’t see any part of my body below my face, and yet this woman immediately knew that I’d recently had surgery. She didn’t make a big deal about it. She just asked me how I was recovering. These people, it’s not like they’re trying to see something—they just know it. It’s a gift. They don’t want you to pay them. It’s a kind of burden they carry. The good news, or maybe bad news, is that all of them say that death is not the end. On the contrary, it’s just the beginning of a long and fucking hard road.”