In “Official Competition,” Argentinian directors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn, with their longtime collaborator, screenwriter Andrés Duprat, send up film culture in this tragicomic dissection of the artist’s way, or rather, ways. Legendary Spanish stars Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas team up with Duprat, Cohn and Argentinian star Oscar Martínez to embody the different strains of pretentiousness that permeate the film industry, and the combustion that happens when all three are thrown together in a high-pressure situation.
This moviemaking satire starts with the money, of course. An aging pharmaceutical mogul, Humberto Suárez (José Luis Goméz) turns 80 and starts to look back on his legacy, considering what to put his name on. Not a building, not a bridge, but a movie, a good one. So he hires a critically acclaimed, Palme d’Or winning filmmaker, the eccentric Lola Cuevas (Cruz) and buys the rights to a Nobel prize-winning novel titled “Rivalry,” though he’s unfamiliar with both Lola’s work and the contents of the book. Nevertheless, he installs her in his empty charity foundation building, a hulking labyrinth of brutal modern architecture, and whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.
What she wants is to pair a prestigious, well-respected actor and acting teacher, Iván Torres (Martínez) with one of the country’s biggest stars, Félix Rivero (Banderas), pitting them against each other in a loose adaptation of the novel about a lifelong rivalry between two brothers. She’s scheduled nine days of closed rehearsal, during which she subjects Iván and Félix to an increasingly absurd series of “exercises” intended to “transform” them, hoping to break down their egos. Lola’s ironic, artsy pretentiousness rubs up against Iván’s super serious reverence for his craft and code of ethics, which then clashes with Félix’s diva behavior and demands. It’s unclear who will make it out of this situation intact, but what a joy it is to watch an outlandishly wigged Cruz torture these two men, as the three squabble and manipulate while searching for a scrap of artistic transcendence.
