Official Competition – Competencia Oficial in its original Spanish – is the eighth film from collaborators Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn, famed for their innovative techniques in television production and, as this movie doles out in spades, meta-commentary on art and those who create it. And while its runtime stretches the audience’s patience somewhat, this black comedy is largely successful in doing just that.
When an elderly multimillionaire decides he wants his name attached to a piece of awards-baiting cinema, he enlists Cannes Film Festival darling Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz) to direct an adaptation of a lauded novel, the plot of which consists of two brothers falling out over one of them being responsible for the accidental death of their parents. The eccentric Cuevas taps seasoned thespian Iván Torres (Oscar Martinez) and seasoned celebrity Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas) to play the brothers, but as her extreme rehearsal tactics – combined with their contrasting acting methods – ramp up, life begins to steadily imitate art.
The vast majority of the film takes place in an empty, brutalist mansion: a blank canvas for the trio to splatter with their emotionally colourful dynamic. All three of them are full of contradictions that rub each other the right and wrong ways. Lola presents as a free-spirited artist but is incredibly particular and tightly wound; Iván styles himself as a pretentious craftsman but is easily suckered by the banal and fake, while Félix is outwardly image-obsessed and happily vacuous, yet actually desperate to prove himself as the real deal.
Banderas and Martinez’s sparring works well, but it’s Cruz who steals the show, half-swallowed by a mop of frizzy-red hair and ballbusting at every opportunity. Those who think method acting has gone ‘too far’ in recent years will certainly get a kick out of her stunts to break the pair down to get to the ‘truth’ of their performances, and by extension, her worn-out assertion at the film’s press screening that there is no deeper meaning in it all: art that refers to something else isn’t true art, you see. The statement feels pointedly, playfully dismissive of any deeper reading a critic could ascribe to Official Competition itself. It is deep or is it entirely surface-level?
I’d lean towards the former, particularly as the film is stretched too thinly to sustain itself as a broad comedy – moments of absurdity are overly spread out, long periods of time in one location drag a little. But to give it more credit, perhaps this sense of arrested development is meant to emulate the filmmaking process; this, after all, is a film about making a film where the unexpected tragicomedy of that process completely alters the outcome. The final contradiction, however, is that what unfolds on-set remains truer to the fictional film’s source material than the finished product. And its audience – the fictional audience, that is – will never get to know that truth.
Dir: Gastón Duprat & Mariano Cohn (15, 114 mins)
Official Competition is out Fri 26 Aug
words HANNAH COLLINS