My new favorite Spanish actor

Although I've somewhat enjoyed watching Antonio Banderas for a while, I have recently discovered Javier Bardem. Well, not so recently in fact: Biutiful was one of the in-flight movies when I flew out of Beijing in June 2011. I didn't watch more than a few minutes of the movie, but that was the first time that I remember recognizing the actor. It wan't until a few weeks ago when I saw Los Lunes al Sol that it really began to click in my head, though. After looking him up, I realized that I first saw him in Jamón, jamón, during my Spanish-and-Indian-movie-week of Spring Festival 2011. Later, when I was in Minnesota for parts of June and July of 2011, I saw him in Carne Tremula and Mar Adentro, both of which I enjoyed.


I saw some similarities between Los Lunes al Sol and Biutiful. They both focused on the hard life that people have with not much money living in Barcelona. Although I enjoyed Los Lunes al Sol, I thought that Biutiful was really a beautiful movie. I did enjoy that it had some Mandarin spoken by the Chinese immigrant workers, but the sorrow of the film, the tragedy there, and the hard life portrayed are things that I found to be very moving.


I really like movies like that: perhaps it is because I was raised on movies that always had happy endings and always had the good guys win. These films cut black and white so clearly, and films that display the world as more ambiguous seem so much more real to me. Main characters that aren't very good or heroic, obstacles that aren't from a megalomaniac evil person, and difficulties that can't be blamed or placed on any person, but merely are. Sometimes I wonder if movies that display conflict as so clear-cut and black-and-white are somewhat responsible for simplified views of the world. The movies that I saw as a child were almost all American movies, but that isn't to say that other countries don't have movies like this too. I think that this is also one of the many reasons that I like Miyazaki films so much: rather than having villains and heroes, the antagonists of his films often have clear motivations that an audience can understand and sympathize with, such as wanting to protect one's people from destructive monsters, or to be reunited with a long-lost loved one.


In Biutiful, Javier plays a man with a pretty tough life. Not enough money to treat his children as well as he would like, an ex with drug problems who keeps coming back, trying to manage a bunch of illegal street vendors while placating (bribing) the cops enough to back off, and dealing with a high pressure agreement with Chinese immigrants workers make his life difficult right from the start of the film. When he gets more bad news he makes some small efforts to live a better life, but this is no Disney fable, so the world continues to shit on him. I highly recommend it. This is one of the best Spanish movies that I have seen. Biutiful was nominated for many film awards, and it won several of them too, so if you care about film committees and their opinions that may sway you.