Biutiful

Rating:**1/2

Movie Review: Biutiful Uxbal is a Barcelona resident who inhabits the dark side. He makes money off other people’s misery,being instrumental in getting illegal immigrants to work in airless sweatshops. But Uxbal as played by Javier Bardem ( nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role),is not all bad : he has a conscience,and it pricks. He tries intervening when a Senegalese man is about to be deported; he tries making up by offering the man’s wife and baby succour when he can’t do anything else. And when he discovers that helpless people have died because of what he’s done,he falls to his knees,and cries.

The reason why you don’t dump on the conflicted Uxbal ( Bardem) is because he is dying. And because this is an Inarritu film,‘Biutiful’ tells us this in more ways than one : ranging from a lovely,quiet scene where he finds comfort but no false promises,to another where the declaration of impending death is flung at a near-naked woman in a noisy strip bar. But it also puts you in the uneasy position of dredging up sympathy for a man who ordinarily should deserve none : does peeing blood,leading to an inexorable draining of the life force,relieve him of responsibility?

Uxbal is the soul of this movie,which is too overheated for its own good. Inarritu is a master of creating unbearable tension : you can actually feel yourself straining towards a desired end in his films,but he is also a director prone to excess,who pushes,sometimes too strongly,for neat circular transitions. In a film like ‘Amores Perros’,one of his early films,it works magnificently. In ‘Biutiful’,also nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars,it takes away from the potential power of the story of a dying man looking for expiation. What kept me glued,regardless,was the leading man whose increasingly ravaged eyes reflect a thousand tragedies with such ease : Bardem is truly ‘biutiful’.

shubhragupta@expressindia.com