The Beloved – first-look review

Like its leading male character, The Beloved is a mercurial and frustrating beast. At times, it is an absorbing exploration of a fraught father-daughter/director-actress relationship embodied by two impressively textured performances. At others, it is an ostentatious display of shifting formal techniques that draws attention to its own contrivances and erodes its dramatic substance.

The mighty Javier Bardem (who is aging like a fine wine) leans into the menacing potential of his alpha stature to conjure up that cinematic spectre: a great yet tyrannical director. In his heyday, the internationally-acclaimed Esteban Martínez picked up one Palme d’Or, two Oscars, and a case of alcoholism. 

Now sober, he is prepping a new picture in Spain — an exciting event for the nation since he long since left for the promised land of America. ​‘Desierto’ is a Laurence of Arabia-esque desert picture to be shot on Fuerteventura, substituting for Western Sahara. Esteban consulted the same playbook as Stellan Skarsgard in Sentimental Value and reached out to his estranged adult daughter, ​“amateur” actress Emilia (Victoria Luengo) to offer her a lead role.

Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Soroyen drops us into the restaurant where they break bread for the first time in years. A fascinating, serpentine discussion erupts from the initial, exaggeratedly polite chit-chat, revealing exactly where the historic mines are buried. This is the first of many simmering dialogue scenes that, if excerpted and edited together, would make a great (and significantly shorter) stand-alone film. Bardem delivers a layered performance as the Great Director cosplaying as a normal person to an important audience of one. He channels faux humility while pitching to Emilia. Yet his face flickers with darkness at any sign of her resistance, while outright negativity causes him to lash out, seething.

Luengo as Emilia also plays with contrasts. She pastes on a smile and speaks with a smidge of hysteria, skirting around the iceberg of painful memories until they demand to be remembered. She recognises objectively that Esteban is bringing a real opportunity. Her acting career is stalling in soap opera land, and working together might create a relationship where none currently exists. The combustible man sitting before her doesn’t seem fully reformed; however, she says yes anyway.

The majority of the runtime unfolds on the film-set and the script makes cumbersome work of weaving the relationship drama around the filmmaking sequences. Scenes tend to play long, possessing a lumbering improvisational quality irrespective of their significance to the central relationship stakes. These narrative lulls emphasise the hollow nature of the filmmaking theatrics Soroyen deploys — not just for ​“Desierto,” but for The Beloved.
 

The film’s look is in constant flux as Soroyen changes the grade, shifts the aspect ratio and experiments with shooting on everything from 8mm to 65mm. Most distracting are the frequent switches from colour to black and white whenever the camera holds on Esteban’s or Emilia’s secret turmoil. It is like reading a novel where the author has bolded all the most subtext-rich sections to ensure we understand the point. Soroyen’s reliance on this technique undermines the most impressive artistry present: the work of Bardem and Luengo.