| GOYA IN BORDEAUX Director: Carlos Saura "It is a story with a plot but it is not realism. I don't like working on realistic projects. because I don't believe that memory is ever the same as reality. We wanted to avoid betraying the spirit of Goya, but neither did we want to have cliched 'Goya-esque' images." Pedro Moreno, Costume Designer One of the first images of Goya in Bordeaux shows the carcass of a bull hanging in mid-air and as the camera moves toward the flesh of the interior, the innards suddenly morph into the face of the painter Goya. It’s a, not very subtle but, great shot that actually makes an artistic statement out of a cinematic trick that’s usually reserved for action films. Director Carlos Saura and the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro have been doing these types of great shots for years. They have now collaborated on four films together creating and perfecting a series of striking theatrical cinema. This one is about the famous 18th-19th century Spanish painter Francesco Goya (a roly poly gravel-voiced Francesco Rabal). The film starts with Goya on his deathbed living in exile in Bordeaux and then works in various strands of his life through flashbacks, dreams, nightmares, memories and paintings. We’ve seen this before most recently in Time Regained another film made by an artist (Raul Ruiz) about an artist (Marcel Proust) reflecting on his life. Principle among the memories of Goya’s that we see are his love lives, the horrors he witnessed during Spain’s fight for independence and the fantastic classical world he imagined and painted that make up his distinguished body of work. Aesthetically, the sets and the art direction -- by Pierre-Louis Thevenet (who it's worth noting worked on El Cid and Patton) -- are gorgeously constructed and lit. The theatrical style uses moveable, transparent walls, numerous large paintings, classical detailed props and various indoor and outdoor backdrops. At times the film looks like a Rembrandt, a Vermeer or -- more obvioudly -- a Goya painting with an emphasis on the warm, rich colors of that naturalistic pre-Modernism period. And Saura, along with Storaro, uses a lot of back lit shots with characters posing and standing in place. Some may think that the theatricality, the use of chiaroscuro lighting and the overall use of such art film techniques, make the film pretentious but that kind of thinking would only serve to deny the filmmakers their own form of originality. True, Saura doesn’t use a strict biographical narrative and the characters are not fully fleshed out (although the acting is very good), but who wants a painter’s life to be sketched in linear terms anyway? Although Goya in Bordeaux keeps a cold distance, develops unsympathetic characters, eludes a straight-forward plot line and runs long at 117 minutes it does the one thing that few films about painters do; it imagines the life of a painter by itself becoming a work of art. - Matt Langdon |