Plenty of movies have tangled with the preening egos of superstar actors, but Official Competition — a shrewd behind-the-scenes satire featuring Spanish icons Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas — might be the first to feature a bunch of gleaming acting trophies being crushed by an industrial shredder.
The scene arrives midway through an increasingly tense rehearsal process: Cruz's unorthodox film director has shrink-wrapped her two male stars like conjoined mummies and is feeding their various awards — and delusions of grandeur — into the unforgiving jaws of the shredder, the sound of machine-crumpled metal and pathetic, emasculated moans making for extremely satisfying, very funny stuff.
The presence of Cruz and Banderas in a meta-movie about the production of a Spanish melodrama might suggest the hand of Pedro Almodóvar, but Official Competition — which takes its name from film festival parlance and revolves around the production of a pulpy sibling drama called Rivalry — is the work of Argentine directors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn, a filmmaking team who come from a background in television and experimental video.
They bring a certain high-definition sheen to Official Competition from which Almodóvar would likely recoil; a sense that this is less a love letter to the art of movie-making than an impish dissection of its archaic, deranged pomposity — as seen under the harsh glare of 21st-century screen production, and performed by a pair of superstar film actors whose careers just keep getting more interesting in middle age.
With her dazzling explosion of Sideshow Bob hair, Cruz's cigar-chomping sapphist Lola Cuevas is a brilliant but tempestuous, self-involved artiste commissioned by a sad billionaire (José Luis Gómez, Broken Embraces) who feels his life has amounted to nothing and wants to make a contribution to art.
Handed a filmmaker's dream — a blank cheque and total artistic control — Lola sets about freely adapting a popular novel and casts two stars from opposite ends of the acting spectrum, hoping the tension will generate sparks.
It's a vanity project for everyone involved.
Enter Félix Rivero, a movie star playboy who arrives for rehearsals in a baseball cap, Lamborghini and the arms of a blonde decades younger; a character who Banderas — who's clearly having a ball — relishes in all his egomaniacal self-confidence.
His prestigious co-star, Iván Torres (Argentine actor Oscar Martínez, The Distinguished Citizen) — who Félix immediately irks by calling "maestro" — is a respected acting heavyweight whose accolades, turtlenecks and Shakespearean beard can barely conceal his blinkered contempt for popular cinema, or his snobby disdain for the general audience that Félix warmly, unpretentiously embraces.
Lola knows she's got a showdown, even before she proceeds to ramp up the atmosphere of animosity by variously suspending a five-tonne rock over her co-stars' heads, putting their precious hardware into the pulper, or — in what might be the movie's best, or at least most erotically charged scene — humiliating their straight-male prowess by demonstrating, in hilariously graphic detail, how to make out with their young female co-star (Irene Escolar).
If Official Competition initially seems a little under-baked, even lazy in setting its sights on familiar targets, then Cohn and Duprat's film sneaks up toward something very satisfying, shapeshifting in tandem with its examination of duelling performance modes — and the attendant anxieties of filmmakers — to the point where the film seems to be satirising the act of showbiz satire itself.
With the ground constantly moving beneath Lola, Félix and Iván, and their mind games reaching absurdist levels of one-upmanship, Official Competition puts the usual concerns — the nature of acting, the responsibility of art toward its audience — through its very own metaphorical shredder, relishing the contradictions.
Playing off a stoically funny turn from Martínez as the elitist, self-regarding thespian, Banderas gives a wonderful, showboating performance as the movie star who doesn't need to understand his character's motivation, uses a menthol stick to cry on cue, and has a contract clause forbidding anyone from touching his face — the kind of role that the combustible actor, who most recently drew acclaim for his subdued work in Almodóvar's Pain and Glory, seems to have been building his entire mid-career toward.
The film's most startling moment finds Banderas up-ending the expectations of everyone around him by proving just how deceptively good movie stars can be, a scene that Cohn and Duprat shoot through the looking glass: Félix in wide shot dwarfed by a giant, high-definition video feed and maudlin music, with performance and 'truth' blurring toward a clever punchline. (In this and other scenes, Laurence Olivier's famous words to Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man — "My dear boy, why don't you just try acting? — are never far from the mind.)
It's a particularly European — or in this case, Argentine-European — approach to showbiz satire that's resistant to taking sides in debates over the ethics of art and performance, an ambivalence that's as satisfying as it is slippery.
There are more than few echoes of Oliver Assayas's Irma Vep, the recent HBO series that takes a similarly playful and multifaceted approach to behind-the-scenes production and the tensions between filmmakers and performers.
Both understand that there is ultimately little difference between stardom and prestige, vulgarity and respectability, between the fake and the real — those are distinctions made not by audiences, but by the presumptions and over-analysis of redundant criticism.
As Lola fires back at a tiresome, ideology-driven line of questioning from a hack journalist at the finally completed film's press conference: "A film isn't an affirmation, an answer to a question, just as art does not refer to something, but is a thing in itself."
Official Competition is in cinemas now.
