Biutiful

Last week, I saw an unusual film from Spain. It was called "Biutiful", the way the protagonist's daughter wrote the English word on to a photograph of the snow-covered summit of the Pyrenees against a clear blue sky. The photograph was pinned on the door of a run-down refrigerator in the kitchen of a small studio flat in the slums of modern day Barcelona.She wrote it out letter by letter as her father half hesitantly spelt it out for her in response to her question. We see in the girl's eyes how she longed to have a ski-ing holiday there. 

The film was co-written, co-produced and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and starred Javier Bardem, the winner of the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Fesitval in May, 2010. This is a powerful film about the life of a man living at the margin of contemporary Barcelona, with its illegal immigrants from Africa and China, its need for cheap labor, for drugs, for sex, for violence, for amusement, for escape from boredom, from death but ultimately for meaning.

As the film opens, we see a man smoking amongst the snow amidst the bare branches of some denuded trees, pensive. A dark skinned young man approaches. They eye one another from a distance. The young man decides to get closer. The first offers the other a cigarette. The other takes it. They smile. They take a puff on their own cigarette, each continuing to think their own thoughts about their own separate problems. They separate, in silence.

Next our ears are bombarded with the deafening sounds of some disco music. Nude ladies were doing some pole dance on the stage in the flickering colors of a stroboscope in a bar disco filled with cigarette smoke, boose, half clad hookers shuffling around  men looking for one night stands. We see the hero talking to his fat brother, Tito (played by Eduard Fernández) his back against the entwining arms of two women. His brother introduces a passing young hooker to him . The hooker beckons him with an alluring look and says he looks great. He is not interested. He had come to talk business, about getting work for some illegal immigrants. He is Oxbal, played by Bardem. 

We are then shown scenes of some slum sweat shop producing garments. We see oriental faces speaking nothing but Putonghua, their hands feverishly putting certain cut cloth under the fast stitching needles of some electric sewing machines. Supervising them are two Chinese men, one younger and the other middle aged. The older man does not speak Spanish but the younger man does. From the way they talk in Chinese and the way they look at each other, they appear to be engaged in some kind of lovers quarrel as much over the direction their business is moving as their personal relationship. The older man interrupted their quarrel to give Oxbal some money to sweeten it for the Spanish authorities and they resumed their quarrel which ended with one of them kissing the other on the mouth.  

Then the scene switches to that of a woman dancing naked, a glass of wine in her hand over a bed. Sleeping on the bed is the Oxbal's brother, Tito. The woman steps on to the man's back. The man pulls her over to kiss her. We learn later that the woman is Oxbal's wife, Ana (played by Hanna Bouchaib) . The movie moves on in scene after rapid scene as we follow the life of Oxbal: he had to see the police to keep them from looking where they ought to, to arrange work for illegal African workers, Chinese illegal workers, to find accommodation to house them, to push drugs, to spend time occasionally in funeral parlors to tell anxious relatives the thoughts of corpses for pay, he having inherited such a supernatural psychic gift from his mother's family, to feed his children, to take them to school and to make them happy etc.

In fact, we learn as the film unrolls that he has two young children, is separated from his wife who left him because of her violence and his cancer, she herself being a drunk, a dope addict, a violent mother and a slut. But his wife comes one day to see the children and says she loves him and wants to be given another chance. She begs him. He relents but she relapses into her irresponsible ways: she promises to take the children to their dream holiday in the Pyrenees but leaves her daughter behind on the ground of some trivial disobedience. He has to take the children away from her but in the meantime, he learns that his cancer is worsening and does not have long to live. He struggles to keep his family and his own hectic life together amidst the mad jumble of all the things he has to do. He saw that the illegal Chinese workers were sleeping on the floor without any heating. He bought some cheap gas heaters from a second hand store and gave them to the workers. Then he learned from the TV that all of them died the night before and their bodies were disposed of by their Chinese bosses by dumping them on to a nearby beach. He was struck with a terrible guilt. He blamed himself for not ensuring that the heaters were in working order and not leaking gas before he bought them. We see him agonising over his lack of judgement out of a desire to scrimp on what little money he had.

He loves his children, but knowing of his impending fate, he has little choice but to leave them to the care of an African woman whose husband was arrested and deported and for whom he had engaged in a fight during the former's scuffles with the arresting Spanish police. When the signs of death became imminent, he gave her all the money that he had and asked the African woman to take care of them. When the film ends, we see the African woman with her own toddler child at the Barcelona Airport on a homeward bound flight back to Africa. 

It was a fast film in which we have some spectacular cinema work from Rodgrigo Prieto, who manages to glut our eyes with an incredibly rich feast of colors and forms. We have simply superb acting from Bardem and also a first rate musical score from Gustavo Santaolalla, which adds not a little to the pace and mood of the fast but emotive scenes. A postmodern saga of love, violence, greed, betrayal in the life of a petty criminal striving honestly to find some order and to retain a modicum of humanity amidst the impossibly maddening pace of big city life in the fragmented and alienating half world of criminals and illegals in contemporary Spain. He buckled under the strain of trying desperately to keep a balance between devotion to family, friends, health and the need to make a living or merely to survive.  Nobody can survive under such circumstances. His world finally disintegrates under the weight of all kinds of pressures into that ultimate chaos: that of a cancerous death! There is no lack of dark irony: the hero's attempt to give warmth to the illegal Chinese immigrants results in their massacre by gas. Oxbal's wife attempt to give joy to her children results in desertion of her daughter, an occasion for joy turns into an occasion for heart-breaks. Oxbal's dedication to the welfare of the black illegal immigrant and that of his wife results in the betrayal by the latter's wife, who took all his money and deserted his children. Nothing turns out the way the protagonist expects. Is the chaos of his life a reflection of the fragmentation of Spanish society or the other way round? Is his cancer merely personal or social? Does the film lament or rejoice in such fragmentation or disintegration? Who is right? Who is wrong? Who a hero? Who a villain? Does it matter? A sad movie. But what an excellent one!