Goya in Bordeaux (1999)
A beautifully filmed and imaginative look at Spanish painter Goya's final years in France. There are fantastical flashbacks (really nicely created with translucent sets and changing lighting) and there are imagined versions of scenes that led to his paintings, highly colorful and gruesome. And effective.
If this movie isn't a raging masterpiece, it is mostly because there is no real plot. It's slow going, even though it is meant to be deliberate and patient. It meanders along as he lives out his final isolated years and we are shown (in spurts) his work and his past. The old Goya himself is played with believable gusto by Francisco Rabal, and the younger (with surprising continuity) by Jose Coronado. Neither are names familiar to American viewers, but both are convincing, which isn't always easy portraying a famous artist. If there is a deeper point here, it is the journey we all make toward death. And from what I read, Goya was afraid of death, and would be afraid of old age just as much as this movie implies.
If you like your artists heroic and inspired, you might find this version of Francisco Goya a little earthy and self-absorbed. But for me this was about right. He was an old man with little future, too much pain to make significant new work, and lots of memories. Of course, this being a movie (and being about life, too), there is an emphasis on his love affairs, or at least his interest in one particular rich woman, the Duchess of Alba. In truth, there isn't a clear history of Goya being involved with this woman, though there are several portraits of her (not including, most likely, the famous pair of reclining figures, one nude and one clothed, though this is implied if not stated in the movie).
All of this is neither here nor there for loving what is wonderful about the movie. Director Carlos Saura has created a magical world for this final great painter, one filled with the grotesqueness we associate with his work but also with terrific inventiveness, making the paintings come to life without simply re-staging them. The best last sections of the film are a tour-de-force, and indeed the whole movie is vivid and surprising. If we are sometimes slightly unenthused about the events going on (which are often nothing much), we are completely sucked in by the ever changing scenes and sets and hallucinatory worlds, part real and part Goya's dying mind.
In other words, the best of this movie is simply amazing. And any movie with such amazing portions is worth watching, at least in those parts.
A beautifully filmed and imaginative look at Spanish painter Goya's final years in France. There are fantastical flashbacks (really nicely created with translucent sets and changing lighting) and there are imagined versions of scenes that led to his paintings, highly colorful and gruesome. And effective.
If this movie isn't a raging masterpiece, it is mostly because there is no real plot. It's slow going, even though it is meant to be deliberate and patient. It meanders along as he lives out his final isolated years and we are shown (in spurts) his work and his past. The old Goya himself is played with believable gusto by Francisco Rabal, and the younger (with surprising continuity) by Jose Coronado. Neither are names familiar to American viewers, but both are convincing, which isn't always easy portraying a famous artist. If there is a deeper point here, it is the journey we all make toward death. And from what I read, Goya was afraid of death, and would be afraid of old age just as much as this movie implies.
If you like your artists heroic and inspired, you might find this version of Francisco Goya a little earthy and self-absorbed. But for me this was about right. He was an old man with little future, too much pain to make significant new work, and lots of memories. Of course, this being a movie (and being about life, too), there is an emphasis on his love affairs, or at least his interest in one particular rich woman, the Duchess of Alba. In truth, there isn't a clear history of Goya being involved with this woman, though there are several portraits of her (not including, most likely, the famous pair of reclining figures, one nude and one clothed, though this is implied if not stated in the movie).
All of this is neither here nor there for loving what is wonderful about the movie. Director Carlos Saura has created a magical world for this final great painter, one filled with the grotesqueness we associate with his work but also with terrific inventiveness, making the paintings come to life without simply re-staging them. The best last sections of the film are a tour-de-force, and indeed the whole movie is vivid and surprising. If we are sometimes slightly unenthused about the events going on (which are often nothing much), we are completely sucked in by the ever changing scenes and sets and hallucinatory worlds, part real and part Goya's dying mind.
In other words, the best of this movie is simply amazing. And any movie with such amazing portions is worth watching, at least in those parts.