If You Love Movies, ‘Official Competition’ May Be for You

While the filmmakers’ motives and messages come off as obvious and run-of-the-mill, the actors they managed to bring together imbue the material with as much pathos and bathos as possible.

IFC Films via AP
Antonio Banderas, left, and Penelope Cruz in a scene from ‘Official Competition.’ IFC Films via AP

Movies about movies have been appearing at an alarming rate in recent years, with Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the Coen Brothers’ “Hail, Caesar!” and James Franco’s “The Disaster Artist” but a few of the entries. This trend even extends beyond Hollywood, as the new Spanish-Argentine movie “Official Competition” confirms.   

Starring Penelope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, and Oscar Martinez, “Official Competition” begins with a wealthy, aging pharmaceutical executive expressing a wish to create something lasting in his name. The idea of producing a movie, complete with a top-tier director and great actors, comes to him as a way to align with “prestige” in his effort to be remembered. He evidently doesn’t realize that even cinephiles often don’t recall the names of the producers of great films, much less the general population. Setting that aside, the moviemaking plot is set in motion.

The problem is, there’s not much plot to move things along — just a series of arty tableaux in which Ms. Cruz as the director and Messrs. Banderas and Martinez as the two leads rehearse the script. During these rehearsals, the director subjects the actors to absurdist “exercises” in order to help the actors craft their characters, such as using a crane to suspend a five-ton boulder just inches from their heads.

When the director asks the two egotistical actors to bring in some of the awards they’ve won over the years, it doesn’t take a seasoned scriptwriter to guess what she intends to do with these baubles. While this particular “exercise” is predictable, there’s a certain satisfaction at hearing and watching, via a medium shot and then a closeup of the machine’s rotating jaws, an industrial shredding machine grind down tackily designed awards, a laptop, a microphone, and more. 

The directors of “Official Competition,” Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn, do allow a glimpse of the real world during these rehearsals/shenanigans, as when a homeless person is artfully placed outside a burger place or when a cleaning lady comes to sweep up the mess created by the grinding machine. But most of the movie’s runtime is taken up with well-composed wide shots of minimalist interiors as the actors and their director argue and play tricks on each other. 

The humor can be agreeably lowkey, at times dark and at others lowbrow, but one is hard-pressed to figure out what Messrs. Duprat and Cohn are trying to say about the production of art cinema, beside the obvious point that it can be pretentious. Seemingly their one novel idea was to take the film festival term “Official Competition” and make it a pun on the actors’ rivalries with each other and their director. 

While the filmmakers’ motives and messages come off as run-of-the-mill, the actors they managed to bring together imbue the material with as much pathos and bathos as possible. Ms. Cruz, with a shock of red curly locks, drolly plays up the director’s pretensions but still manages to make the character a recognizable type of striver. Mr. Martinez is perfectly cast as the righteous and equally pretentious man of the stage, with his reactions of barely contained disgust and incredulity amusing to watch. 

Yet it’s Mr. Banderas who brings the most devilish sense of fun to this rather astringent comedy. Playing an actor who may not be much of one, he embodies the “movie star” character all too well through his attempts at keeping up with the notions of his esteemed acting partner and lofty director. Mr. Banderas is clearly having a good time, like he used to in Almodóvar’s early movies — and certainly more than he did in the dour “Pain and Glory.” 

Speaking of other directors, the duo behind the lens seem to take digs at a few of their fellow filmmakers, such as Mr. Tarantino, Lars von Trier, and Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Lobster,“ “The Favorite”). Or maybe they’re homages; it’s difficult to tell since the satire is so weak. What non-cineastes will make of these references is anybody’s guess. “Official Competition” isn’t intended for them.

What we have is myopic movie about the making of a movie made only for a select crowd. Who needs real life when there are actors talking about acting on an endless loop? As Mr. Martinez’s character states at one self-aware point in the film: “One thing the world doesn’t need is more actors.”


The New York Sun

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