A review on the making-of-a-movie drama 'Propeller One-Way Night Coach' starring Javier Bardem as a filmmaker directing his estranged daughter, Emilia (Victoria Luengo), in Rodrigo Sorogoyen's film.
‘The Beloved’ Review: Javier Bardem Is Powerful as a Film maker Directing His Estranged Daughter in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Making-of-a-Movie Drama ‘Propeller One-Way Night Coach’ Review: John Travolta’s Slim and Winning Boyhood Reverie of Air Travel in the Lost-Paradise Age of TWA ‘John Lennon: The Last Interview’ Review: Steven Soderbergh’s Documentary Captures John Lennon at His Happiest…and Most Messianic ‘Fatherland’ Review: Thomas Mann and His Daughter Travel Across Germany in 1949 in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Meticulous Time Machine of a Drama ), who returns to his native Spain to shoot a movie in the desert and hires his estranged actress daughter, Emilia , to play one of the leads.
He claims that she’s the best one for the role, but we assume he’s doing it to mend fences . That makes the movie sound a lot like “Sentimental Value,” in which Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve played similar roles. The two films overlap in numerous ways. But “The Beloved,” unlike “Sentimental Value,” really is one of those movies about the making of a movie, like “Day for Night” or “The Stunt Man.
” It’s a meaty and enjoyable entry in the genre, one that updates it to the present day, when it’s not as easy as it once was for a director to bully a cast and crew The explanation for their separation begins to come to the fore when Esteban recalls how much he used to like taking Emilia to the movies when she was 12 and 13. But she remembers it differently, referencing the time they went to see “Kill Bill: Volume 2” and Esteban was drunk and high and got into a fistfight.
This doesn’t square at all with his memory, and that’s the conflict that underlies “The Beloved”: her long-simmering pain vs. his denial of ever having caused it. The theme is a conduit for a larger meditation, one that runs throughout the film, on the narcissism of male anger. It’s been a while since Bardem had a role this straight-up that he could sink his choppers into.
He is always a formidable presence, but since Esteban is himself a force — charismatic and manipulative, ruthless but cunningly quiet about it — for a while we just feel like we’re watching Javier Bardem in all his handsome, magnetic and unmistakable aggro Javier glory. The subtle power of his performance, and it’s a terrific one, is that it takes us a while to grasp the kind of mind games Esteban is a master of.
For years, he was known as an enfant terrible; now he’s matured. The movie he’s shooting is a high-minded period piece called “Desert,” set in the Western Sahara, about the Sahrawi uprising against Spanish colonialism, and part of what’s deadpan funny about “The Beloved” is that we have almost no idea what’s going on in any given scene of the movie-within-the-movie; it might be a piece of middlebrow junk.
of filmmaking, the on-set politics and clashes of personality. He has made “The Beloved” in a playful and, at moments, prankishly cerebral way, cutting in black-and-white sequences and staging the filmmaking in a deliberately disorienting way, all to put us in the shoes of Emilia, who’s fairly discombobulated by the whole process.
He also fills in Esteban and Emilia’s history with an arresting slice of invented cinephilia: We know that Emilia’s mother was an actress named Charo Vera , and we see clips of the movie he made with her back in the ’90s — it was his first film, called “Sorocco,” which many still think is his best, and it featured a much-talked-about existential three-way bedroom scene. But after the success of that film, Esteban walked away from his family.
He now has a new, younger, second family. In glimpses, we get to know the actors in “Desert,” the trouble-shooting assistant director , the cinematographer who winds up quitting with three weeks to go. And Sorogoyen uses the shooting of an outdoor country lunch-table scene that becomes a chain of mishaps to stage the most bravura sequence of “The Beloved” — a hilariously anguished vision of what it looks like when the process of filmmaking breaks down.
The actors start to fall into giggle fits, which infuriates Esteban, but what incenses him most is that they aren’t consuming the fish stew in front of them with the proper on-camera gusto . He turns his “direction” of their actorly eating into a battle of wills spiced with a pinch of sadism.
He’s throwing no more of an on-set tantrum than so many directors have, but as one of his assistants points out, you can’t quite get away with that anymore. What “The Beloved” is saying, analogously, is that what you really can’t get away with anymore is abandoning your family and convincing yourself it’s okay. Luengo’s performance becomes more touching as Emilia’s fury rises to the surface.
And while Bardem plays Esteban as a righteous control freak, we can see, by the end, that what he’s trying to keep a lid on is his buried regret over his own actions. For nearly the entire film, he won’t admit that to himself.
But what Bardem’s masterful acting shows you is that underneath it all, he‘The Beloved’ Review: Javier Bardem Is Powerful as a Filmmaker Directing His Estranged Daughter in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Making-of-a-Movie DramaA Le Pacte, Caballo Films, Moviestar Plus+, El Se Querido AIE production. Producers: Nacho Lavilla, Eduardo Villanueva. Executive producers: Javier Bardem, Clara Lago.
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