Set in a Barcelona far-removed from the guidebooks and not on any routes of the open-top bus tours, Biutiful shows a side to Spain’s second city which the tourist board would prefer you didn’t see. This is a Barcelona of illegal immigrants knocking off fake designer handbags and CDs in a crowded basement, of grating poverty, violence and broken families.
Only once does the Barcelona of elegant boulevards and stunning architecture come crashing into view, when police raid an illegal market flogging the fake goods. They chase petrified African immigrants down the famous Las Ramblas, pushing over tables and causing a human statue to move more than just an eyebrow.
Biutiful follows the last few months of Uxbal, played by the Oscar-award winning Javier Bardem (also nominated for an Oscar for this role), who, suffering from terminal cancer, attempts to get his affairs in order before he dies.
Uxbal is a medium who is paid by grieving families to give them news of their departed loved-ones. When not seeing dead people, he acts as a go-between in Barcelona’s criminal underworld, paying off the police on behalf of Chinese counterfeiters and looking after a Senegalese woman whose husband has been deported.
It is a tour de force performance by Bardem, referencing many past roles but all in one movie. I was reminded both of the macho thug in Jamón Jamón, where he first met his now wife Penelope Cruz, and also the bed-bound quadriplegic in The Sea Inside.
Bardem is such a physical actor that Uxbal’s increased frailty is even more heartbreaking. Throughout most of the film, he has to bring up his two young children on his own, and you wonder how they will cope with the loss of their loving father.
As befits a work by Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel), this is also a film where not everything is as it seems. Biutiful opens with Uxbal talking to a mysterious character in a snowy forest, while on occasions we see what Uxbal sees, namely dead people, who stick to the ceilings like Spiderman.
Uxbal is a conflicted character, decidedly old school but also new age. After giving a Chinaman an old school beating, he gives his children new age crystals.
His fall is soundtracked by the genius of Gustavo Santaolalla, a favourite of Iñárritu’s whose music has also appeared on films including The Motorcycle Diaries and Brokeback Mountain. With a simple appearance of strings, a whole mood is conveyed.
Biutiful is an understated work of real power from Iñárritu featuring a stellar central performance from Bardem, one of the finest actors of his generation. It may not feature the Barcelona from the guidebooks, but this is a gritty look at the decline of a complicated man in a complicated city.
Biutiful opens today at the Watershed. Click here for more information.
