GOYA IN BORDEAUX (Goya en Bordeos)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Sony Pictures Classics Director: Carlos Saura Writer: Carlos Saura Cast: Francisco Rabal, Jose Coronado, Daphne Fernandez, Maribel Verdu, Eulalia Ramon, Joaquin Climent, Cristina Espinosa, Jose Maria Pou, Saturnino Garcia, Carlos Hipolito
The Spanish artist Francisco de Goya once said that without imagination, we are no better than the animals. He put his brushes where his mouth is: his lithographs and canvases are so fanciful and innovative that he has been called by some the first modern painter. Few directors could have done a better job in creating an imaginative biopic about the great man than Carlos Saura, who has regularly shunned the boredom of realism in his thirty films--which have included such dramatic works as the violent "Bodas de sangre," and the musically rich "El amor brujo," "Flamenco" and "Tango."
The film opens on a plump, rapidly aging Goya at age 82 where, racked by blinding headaches and afflicted with deafness from a disease he contracted while in his forties, he hallucinates about his life. Shifting from the painter's present in the year 1828, Saura's photographer Vittorio Storaro takes us on a journey that shows Goya as a middle aged man, shifting regularly from the artist's portrayal as a younger man by Jose Coronado to a rendition marked by a strong performance from Francisco Rabal. As Storaro emulates the artist's own palette of colors, transforming the film into what could be best be called paintings in motion, Goya is morphed from the exterior of a butchered piece of meat that is strung up on a wall into the ghostly face of a man who is shortly to face death. Transfixed on the favorite of his many loves, the vibrant, whimsical and arrogant Duchess of Alba whom he calls by her first name Cayetana (Maribel Verdu), Goya follows this apparition while still in his nightshirt, somnambulistically traversing a street where he is almost knocked down by a horse and carriage and gets into an argument with a fellow into whose companion he has bumped. Dependent on his young, impressionable but quickly maturing daughter Rosario (Dafne Fernandez), Goya is now cohabiting with his latest and last lover, Loecadia (Eulalia Ramon)--whose aversion to the man's luridly sorrowful works fortunately has failed to anchor the artist's work in an insipid reality.
As Goya fantasizes furiously about his better days, the time that he produced a wealth of striking oils and also a number of lithographs produced on a cumbersome machine, Saura introduces his audience--an ethereal niche, I'd imagine, because the slow pace and dreamlike ambiance would challenge the typical moviegoer--to a series of scenes both impersonally cruel and pictorially lovely. The one scene that even some teen horror fans might sponge up is a re- enactment of a painting that Goya once created of a mythical story of St. Anthony of Padua in which Anthony questions a buried corpse, which rises from his box to clear an innocent man of his murder while putting finger on the guilty party-- who is promptly executed by the saint. The most theatrical scene involves a performance by a theatre group, La Fura dels Baus, which dramatizes the painter's "Disasters of War," an almost mechanical procession of Napoleon's soldiers firing on Spanish prisoners who are tied to stakes.
"Goya in Bordeaux" would probably attract the sort of audience that enjoyed the recent Canadian entry, "The Red Violin," but while the latter picture is rich in glorious music and an expansive landscape of people who at different times possessed the instrument of the title, "Goya" is theatrical, contained, and in fact cannot hide the fact that almost the entire work has been filmed in studios. The lighting is perhaps its most striking attribute. We see faces come into focus lit presumably by the illumination of a plethora of candles. The death scene is also particularly arresting, a shadow moving slowly over the nightshirt-clad body of a man whose mind has been leaving him. On the whole, the picture, like the doddering artist himself, is generally lacking in vitality and might be better served on the stage than on the big screen. Nonetheless, "Goya in Bordeaux" is a welcome work that sheds light on the artist, though Saura's screenplay often focuses too heavily on his obsession with his greatest love, Cayetana.
Not Rated. Running time: 104 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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