Official Competition – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Offi­cial Com­pe­ti­tion – first-look review

04 Sep 2021

Words by David Jenkins

Four people posing on a red carpet, two women and two men. The women are wearing bold, patterned dresses, and the men are in formal suits.
Four people posing on a red carpet, two women and two men. The women are wearing bold, patterned dresses, and the men are in formal suits.
Big laughs and sear­ing insights into the artis­tic process pow­er this high­ly enjoy­able film world satire.

With a world-beat­ing lead turn in Pedro Almodóvar’s Par­al­lel Moth­ers already under her belt this year, Pené­lope Cruz deliv­ers anoth­er casu­al­ly astound­ing per­for­mance in Argen­tinean duo Mar­i­ano Cohn and Gastón Duprat’s con­cep­tu­al com­e­dy lark, Offi­cial Competition.

She stars as tem­pera­men­tal art­house film direc­tor Lola Cuevas who has mon­ey thrown at her by an age­ing phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal CEO look­ing to enhance his rep­u­ta­tion. He secures the rights to the apoc­ryphal Nobel Prize-win­ning nov­el Rival­ry’ and offers her a blank check to adapt it and pro­duce the great piece of art that will become his legacy.

There’s an ear­ly sug­ges­tion that this is going to be a fair­ly stan­dard tale of the vio­lent clash between the worlds of art and com­merce, as the ultra-demand­ing and idio­syn­crat­ic Lola appears as the antithe­sis of the strict, for­malised, risk-averse scions of busi­ness. And yet, as promised, she is giv­en total free­dom, and the film is instead a doc­u­ment of her cre­ative process and the way she embraces the mul­ti-sen­so­ry chal­lenges of mak­ing a movie.

It is, how­ev­er, large­ly a film about act­ing, as the focus rests main­ly on how Lola wran­gles her two lead per­form­ers into shape. There’s Anto­nio Ban­deras’ charis­mat­ic big mon­ey movie star Félix Rivero, and Oscar Martínez intel­lec­tu­al old guard method actor, Iván Tor­res. The film mer­ci­less­ly pokes fun at the pom­pos­i­ty and idio­cy of the act­ing pro­fes­sion, but at the same time is earnest in its pre­sen­ta­tion of the mag­ic that goes into mak­ing a great per­for­mance. Ban­deras’ per­for­mance as a semi-lousy actor is a remark­able feat of ego-splic­ing and duel-per­son­al­i­ty plate-spin­ning, and he proves that you real­ly have to be a very good actor to be this mild­ly bad.

Mean­while, Lola uses wild­ly exper­i­men­tal tech­niques to break down her stars and immerse them in their char­ac­ters. One sequence sees the bick­er­ing pair rehears­ing while sat under­neath a sus­pend­ed five tonne rock as a way to enhance the ten­sion, and anoth­er has them prac­tic­ing kiss­es on a young female co-star (the CEO’s daugh­ter, of course) with the slop­py smooching sounds chan­neled direct­ly into head­phones by hun­dreds of intru­sive­ly placed microphones.

The film is, in many ways, a satir­i­cal sketch com­e­dy, but one which works like gang­busters due to the com­mit­ment of the actors and the fact that it nev­er ful­ly strays into the realms of the absurd. Many of the big laughs derive not from the sit­u­a­tion, but by the per­nick­ety inter­ac­tions between the cast who offer a mas­ter­class in com­ic tim­ing and acer­bic repar­tee. Every line deliv­ery is immac­u­late, and Cruz in par­tic­u­lar, with her gin­ger frizzy locks, proves that she is a com­ic behe­moth who has too long been laid dormant.

When the film final­ly shifts away from cru­el­ly dis­sect­ing the tech­niques of cre­at­ing art, it becomes a lit­tle less inter­est­ing, and the final act is more con­ven­tion­al­ly plot-dri­ven than the scenes that pre­cede it. Yet even though the film is packed with bel­ly laughs, it is nev­er spite­ful or den­i­gra­to­ry, and always appears thank­ful for the fact that pam­pered artists can pro­duce mir­a­cles if they’re giv­en the time and resources to do so.

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