Antonio Banderas and the art of self-parody – The New Statesman

The phenomenon of actors playing funhouse-mirror versions of themselves has been turbocharged over the past 30 years from Being John Malkovich to This is the End, via TV comedies such as The Larry Sanders Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Trip. Johnny-come-latelys, the lot of them: the practice goes back at least as far as 1964, with Billy Wilders glorious Kiss Me, Stupid, which starred Dean Martin (born Dino Crocetti) as a womanising crooner named Dino.

Now its the turn of Antonio Banderas to make merry with his persona. In Official Competition, a sharp-clawed comedy from the Argentine film-making duo Gastn Duprat and Mariano Cohn, he is Flix Rivero, a movie star with a lucrative US career. When he is cast in a prestigious literary adaptation opposite the highfalutin Ivn Torres (Oscar Martnez), commerce meets art. Ivn is all about rehearsal and immersion; Flix, who reaches for the menthol stick when tears are required, wonders why they cant just get on with it.

The director who has brought them together to play warring siblings, and to exploit their off-screen tension, is Lola Cuevas (Penlope Cruz), the nutty maverick auteur behind The Inverted Rain (a perfect spoof arthouse title). With a wicked glint in her eye, Lola forces them to rehearse with a giant boulder suspended above them on a crane (Use it, use it!), and makes Ivn go over the same piece of dialogue repeatedly until he invests it with the necessary layers of conflicting emotion. The line is: Good evening.

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Ivn has nothing but disdain for actors who defect to Hollywood. I dont want to be the Latino who puts a little bit of colour into entertainment for those numbskulls! he huffs. Hearing this, we cant help but scroll through Banderass English-language credits the Zorro films, the Shrek series and its Puss in Boots spin-offs and marvel at what a good sport he is.

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There is also a scene in which Flix parades armfuls of awards, some of which (Goyas, Golden Globes) Banderas really has won or been nominated for. Ivn claims not to care about such trifles, though privately he rehearses a speech, brandishing a kettle in place of a trophy, in which he scorns the idea of artistic competition. (He even makes an adorable little cheering sound at the end, to suggest an off-screen audience awestruck by his integrity.) Like Banderas, Martnez is spoofing his public image: he is a highly regarded theatre actor in his native Argentina and not short of silverware himself. (His last film with Duprat and Cohn, The Distinguished Gentleman, won him the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival.)

The initial joke of Official Competition is that this whole film-making endeavour has been conceived simply to burnish the reputation of a pharmaceuticals billionaire, Humberto Surez (Jos Luis Gmez), who cant decide whether to build a bridge to ensure his immortality or finance a movie. The eventual and far superior gag is that Lolas apparently cuckoo methods start to bear fruit: both men become more limber under her tutelage. The visual humour as she puts them through their paces is heightened by the austere setting of the Surez foundation. Its pristine, soulless spaces (glass-walled rooms, stone forecourts cleanly delineated by knife-like shadows) suggest both opulence and spiritual emptiness.

Reality makes itself felt only fleetingly: once in a brief shot of a homeless person outside a burger bar, and again in the reflection of a plane crossing the sky overhead, which recalls the plane mounted above Lolas bed in a nosediving position. Christ is crucified on it, arms spread out across its wings a gaudy pop-art homage to the statue of Christ the Redeemer dangling from a helicopter at the start of La Dolce Vita.

Official Competition appears at first to be a standard movie-business takedown la The Player, but it has far more faith in the art form than that. Among its tastiest pleasures is the chance to see Cruz and Banderas sparking together on screen at last; theyve both benefited extensively from the patronage of Pedro Almodvar, yet have coincided only briefly in two of his films, Im So Excited! and Pain and Glory. Now they can properly let their hair down, literally so in the case of Cruz, dragging on cheroots and tossing around her untamed copper torrent of Louis XIV curls.

Official Competition is in cinemas now

[See also: House of the Dragon: sex, violence and top notes of incest]

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Antonio Banderas and the art of self-parody - The New Statesman