In the droll comedy Official Competition, filmmakers fight to see who's most insufferable
Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz have a blast spoofing the film biz in this satirical swipe at the acting process
Whenever a director makes a film about the movie industry, you wonder if they signed on because they wanted to stick a shiv into an often cruel and frustrating business (see: Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful) or if they wanted to craft a heartfelt love letter to the medium that inspired them (see: Tim Burton’s Ed Wood). Official Competition, the droll new comedy from Argentinian writer-directors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn, does both of these things while also functioning as a proxy war between commercial and non-commercial art.
Antonio Banderas and Oscar Martínez play the combatants, actors from opposite ends of the artistic spectrum who collide during rehearsals for a new film directed by an arthouse auteur given eccentric, flame-haired life by Penélope Cruz. Official Competition is not an anything-goes bombardment of film-biz joke grenades, like Ben Stiller’s hilarious, Tropic Thunder. As in Duprat and Cohn’s previous effort, 2016’s The Distinguished Citizen, the satire here is not delivered with a sledgehammer so much as a pin that draws blood but rarely hurts. Consistently amusing, if about a reel too long, it’s a tightly controlled, low-boil send-up of the acting process.
The film opens as pharmaceutical mogul Humberto Suárez (José Luis Gómez) ponders his legacy after his 80th birthday celebration and decides that financing a movie would be his best shot at immortality. He pays a fortune for the rights to a Nobel Prize-winning book he never read about two estranged brothers, and he hires oddball, Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Lola Cuévas (Cruz) to direct the screen adaptation. With her Sideshow Bob hairdo and worrisome promise to create a “very loose version of the novel,” Lola gets to work, casting libidinous movie idol Félix (Banderas), and self-serious thespian Iván (Martínez), in the roles of the warring siblings.
From the jump, when Félix pulls up to the first script reading in a Lambo versus Iván’s modest arrival in a taxi, we get the drift that their nine-day rehearsal period in Humberto’s cavernous office complex will be an ideological face off. The perennially underappreciated Banderas, who has long mixed Hollywood films with smaller productions in his native Spain, comes ready to play, gleefully, if delicately, spoofing the pretentions of movie stardom. A spoiled, gluten-free sellout whose immense fame functions in inverse proportion to how seriously he seems to take his craft, Félix sums up his acting philosophy with the statement, “I’ll study the words and say them with conviction and authority.” This puts him in direct conflict with Iván, a revered acting teacher who thinks film is “an industry for numbskulls.” He can barely hide his disdain for what Félix represents and the terrific Martínez maintains an exterior of grizzled equanimity against Banderas’ A-list swagger.