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Using obvious soundstages, totally unconvincing actors, and dialogue straight out of the "follow your dreams" playbook of tired clichés, the director manages to reduce the fascinating life of one of Spain's greatest painters to absolute tedium. Perhaps its fitting that it is titled "Goya in Bordeaux" as it certainly captures the flavor of the artist's dull last years spent there, essentially dying. For myself, I'm waiting for someone to make "Goya in Madrid" which will, hopefully, depict the dizzying rise of a provincial Aragonese teenager to the coveted title of Court Painter.Maybe the guy who did that Mozart film will have a go at it.RstJ
Keith F. Hatcher
Life is but a series of fortuitous events called destiny. Francisco Goya lived a life fraught with fateful occurences which drove him to despair, and ended his days in Bordeaux. His three-times interpreter, Francisco Rabal, little knew as he made this film that he too would end his days in the same city. Such is the coincidence of life and death.Goya (1999), made as `Goya en Burdeos', hints at these and other casualities in a refined genteel way, notwithstanding the sometimes temperamental mood of the Aragonés painter. The genius of this film is how Storaro's magnificent photography and Saura's gifted and inspired directing, actually brought to life so many of the painter's creations: paintings only seen in Madrid art museums or in books. It was a delight to suddenly recognize in scenes in the film some of these beautiful works, as if magically brought to life by technological tricks, but with so much care. Rabal's interpretation is superb: it could not have been otherwise, this being the third and last time the old Murcian actor had to take on the task of being Goya. It is also worth mentioning Dafné Fernández, who gave an intelligently picturesque performance; as was to be hoped for after seeing her wonderful part as Fuensanta in `Pajarico' (qv) made one year earlier.It cannot be denied that Storaro's photography frequently becomes one of the main protagonists in the film's telling. No doubt this is in response to the peculiarities of Saura's directing, and thus, for me, makes a near-perfect coupling. It must also be added that the music employed in the film has been exquisitely selected, first with Roque Baños' own composing beautifully intertwining with pieces by Boccherini, Couperin, Tchaickovsky and Beethoven, as well as by an anonymous 17th Century Spanish composer sounding very much like Luys de Narváez.A serious film for those who appreciate excursions into historical cultural backgrounds balanced by a stately unhurried production.
Alice Liddel
The patterning motif of 'Goya in Bordeaux' is the spiral, which Goya claims is like life. So this is not the linear historical biography of the artist we have come to expect from Hollywood, moving inexorably from birth, through success and failure, to death. In its circular motion, its conflating time, history, imagination, art, fantasy and dream, the film 'Goya' most resembles is Ruiz's astonishing Proust adaptation, 'Time Regained'.
Here the story progresses through the labyrinth of an artist's mind, where the narrative proceeds from a chance memory or incident rather than chronological order. History is monumental, written in stone, immovable - 'Goya', on the other hand, emphasises, fluidity, instability and fragility - the status of any particular scene is always in doubt, such is the complex nature of Saura's narration. The film appears to begins with a dream - an old man wakes up in a foreign land; he does not know where he is, he walks down strange streets, bewildered by the foreign language and customs, having wandered down the obligatary white corridor, before catching a vision of an old, dead love. The next scene, where a lover and friend bemoan his tendency in his illness to peregrinate, suggests that it wasn't a dream.
This ambiguity continues throughout. After all, the narrative concerns a dying man, whose life flashes before him, memories flooding back of critical biographical moments in the artist's life - his work at Court; his affair with the Duchess of Alba; his exile in France for liberal sympathies - but these are never merely historical, but revealing of Goya's aesthetic as it developed, theoretically and in practice. The biographical emphasis seems justified in that this development is linked to increasing misanthropy, terror, fear of madness and senility. One of his fears is of being in unrestrained imagination, and some of his later, horrifyingly dark works are a far cry from the dutiful Court pictures, even if these burst with a barely contained passion. Goya's development - from patronage to exiled self-expression - marks a crucial development in Western art towards the Romantic, the solipsistic. Goya lived in times of tyranny, barbarity, slaughter, revolution but history is always filtered through his lurid sensibility, as if with Goya came the pessimistic idea that there is no such thing as objective reality.
Saura borrows many devices from Ruiz - the shifting mise-en-scene that flows through time and space, including the aging artist in a dark room watching a gloriously sunny aristocratic garden party decades earlier; or the device of the artists' various selves existing in the same frame. This sense of a personal history as opposed to a chronological one is emphasised in the flimsiness of the mise-en-scene, a literal creation of light and screens.
Comparing Saura to Ruiz, however, is like comparing Arnold Bennett to Virginia Woolf. Saura is simply too heavy-handed to achieve the temporal fleet-footedness necessary. His ideas are frequently literal or banal, his need to transpose everything as dance climaxes in a massacre ballet of obscene bathos. Whereas Ruiz sublimely caught the Proustian rush, Saura cannot hope to reach the visual disturbance and energy of Goya, and contents himself with defacing his work (blood spilling from paintings, etc.) Where Proust's end was a beginning (the decision to write the book he was actually finishing), Saura weighs himself down with portentousness; where Proust's ideas were grounded in a compelling plot of war and social comedy, Saura gets lost in ever-decreasing circles. I'm sure there's a resonant comparison being made between Goya and Saura himself, especially in the speech of regret preceding the massacre - both men liberals serving totalitarian regimes. Again, as with 'Tango', the film's main interest is its exquisite score.
