Wednesday
22Oct2008
Javier Bardem to Star in New Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Film
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 11:29PM
Here's the kind of director-actor pairing I could get
used to:
Javier Bardem will star in
Alejandro
Gonzalez Inarritu's
Biutiful. Bardem will play a man "embroiled in
shady dealings who is confronted by a childhood friend, now a policeman," or so
says
Variety.
One thing that immediately sounds like it's a casualty of the professional split is the pair's signature layered narrative approach. In all three films, one situation was viewed from multiple perspectives, everything from a traffic accident in Mexico altering the lives of a handful of people (Amores Perros) to a stray bullet in Morocco shattering lives in Japan and California (Babel). Biutiful sounds like a straight ahead narrative, which has to be a necessary adaptation Gonzalez Inarritu makes in his career.
Also of note is that Biutiful is a co-production with Cha Cha Cha, the production house Gonzalez Inarritu runs with Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro, which has a five-picture deal with Universal and Focus worth about $100 million.
Reader Comments (1)
It surpises me that a man with such obvious sensibilities as Iñárritu should be messing with his writer.
As Boyd points out the equilibrist writing contributed to making his first films the toast of cineasts.
On the whole though, advanced narratives don't sit well with the majority of movie goers and I have heard a lot of average Joes complain about Babel for instance, not realising that it is a weave of four desitinies.
Possibly, Iñárritu could be heading for main stream success with less advanced writing. Or maybe he will lose a lot of the stuff that made his films worthwhile.
Time will tell.