“Cinema within film” is a concept that has spread over the decades to become a (sub)genre in itself: epic film set stories, sitcoms set on film sets, portraits of neurotic artists dominated by their egos and miseries… The often conflicting creations of films turned into an object of interest in the films themselves.
This trend takes on new vigor with the theatrical release “Official Competition”a film by Argentines Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat shot in the midst of a pandemic in Spain with Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas and Oscar Martínez as protagonists. The satirical look at the creative process is not new for these directors who have already immersed themselves in the world of visual arts (“The artist”, “My masterpiece”), of literature (“The Distinguished Citizen”) and even architecture (“The man next door”), but now they get fully involved in the misadventures of the business and the cinematographic task.
“Official Competition” focuses on the rehearsals prior to the filming of “Rivalidad”, the story of the confrontation between two brothers who are opposed to each other, played in the fiction of fiction by Antonio Banderas (a popular star) and Oscar Martínez (a prestigious actor and teacher of young) under the watchful eye of the manipulative director Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz).
After the first scene, in which a millionaire from the pharmaceutical industry (José Luis Gómez) who after turning 80 wants to do something important like build and then donate a bridge or produce an art film like this one, Cohn and the Duprat brothers (because the co-writer is Andrés Duprat) bet on a ruthless look on the accumulation of jealousy, envy, resentment, narcissism, hypocrisy and cynicism in the field of art.
From Tarantino to the Coens
If this Argentine-Spanish co-production bets on the purest fiction (although some settling of accounts with certain local colleagues can be perceived), other recent films were based – very loosely, it is true – on true stories. “Once upon a time… in Hollywood”, a film by Quentin Tarantino with Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie available on Amazon Prime Video, took aspects linked to the Manson clan, the murder of Sharon Tate in 1969 and the presence of other figures such as Roman Polanski, Bruce Lee or Steve McQueen; while David Fincher’s “Mank” (Netflix) takes us even further back in time with the plight of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) as he writes “The Citizen” for Orson Welles in the midst of the Hollywood studio system.
Classic Hollywood is also the focus of several films by the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen (from Barton Fink with John Turturro and John Goodman, until Hail Caesar! with George Clooney, Josh Brolin and Ralph Fiennes) or Woody Allen (from “The Purple Rose of Cairo” to “The Gaze of Others”), while silent films also inspired “The artist”a black-and-white film by Frenchman Michel Hazanavicius with Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman and James Cromwell that won five Oscars in 2012, including Best Picture, Director and Actor.
Other filmmakers have filmed love letters to cinema, such as the case of Martin Scorsese with “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” and Giuseppe Tornatore with “Cinema Paradiso” or they have laughed at his most pathetic aspects like Ben Stiller in “A Movie War”, about the cast of a war film who end up turned into real soldiers; Tim Burton in “Edwood”, about who was considered the worst director in history; or “The Disaster Artist: Masterpiece”, about in this case the worst movie of all time: “The Room”by Tommy Wiseau.
Cinema in its most artisanal and amateur facet is the starting point for comedies like “Rewinds”by Michel Gondry, with Jack Black, Mos Def and Danny Glover; “Zack and Miri make a porn”, by Kevin Smith, with Elizabeth Banks and Seth Rogen; and “Living in oblivion”by Tom DiCillo with Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener and Dermot Mulroney, about the hardships of an independent production with almost no budget.
Classic Hollywood cinema is also lavish in stories of directors and stars struggling to carry out their projects or falling victim to the excesses of the industry. A journey as limited as it is arbitrary and capricious would take us through “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941), by Preston Sturges, with Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake, about a film director accustomed to shooting light films who, with the idea of making a more committed and social cinema, decides to pass himself off as homeless; “Twilight of a lifetime – Sunset Blvd” (1950), by Billy Wilder, with William Holden, Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim for this tragic melodrama about the relationship between a screenwriter and a disgraced mythical diva; “Singing under the rain” (1952), a Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly musical about the transition from silent to sound film; “Captives of Evil” (1952), by Vincente Minnelli, with Kirk Douglas playing a producer too much like the almighty David O. Selznick; and “The Countess barefoot” (1954), by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, about the life of a star (Ava Gardner) as told by a screenwriter and director (Humphrey Bogart).
The cinema within the cinema was also a constant in European cinema with titles such as “Three Faces for Fear – Peeping Tom” (1960), a disturbing work by Englishman Michael Powell; “Eight and a half” (1963), by the Italian Federico Fellini, with Marcello Mastroianni as an uninspired filmmaker; “The American Night” (1973), by the French François Truffaut; or -already more recent and coming from Spain- “Thesis” (1996), by Alejandro Amenábar, about a student (Ana Torrent) who investigates the underworld of extreme movies known as snuff (often including murder, torture, suicide, necrophilia, infanticide); or “The girl of your eyes” (1998), by Fernando Trueba, about the misadventures of a troupe that travels to Berlin to film as part of an agreement between Franco and Hitler (this film had a sequel in 2016 entitled “The Queen of Spain”).
And let’s cross the Atlantic again to recover “The Last Tycoon” (1976), transposition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished work on Hollywood, directed by Elia Kazan and a cast led by none other than Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum and Jeanne Moreau; “The rules of the game – The Player” (1992), a Robert Altman satire starring Tim Robbins as a studio executive who receives death threats from one of the many screenwriters whose projects he has turned down; “The name of the game – Get Shorty” (1995), Barry Sonnenfeld’s black comedy with John Travolta, Gene Hackman, Rene Russo and Danny DeVito about gangsters in the world of cinema; or “Boogie Nights: Pleasure Games” (1997), by Paul Thomas Anderson, with Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore for a foray into the porn industry of the ’70s.
We could go on with the list and even cover various other installments in this column with more and more titles. Cinema is art, entertainment and business, a fascinating and pathetic universe at the same time, with some great artists and executives and others truly despicable. With all these edges, facets and contradictions, it remains an ideal setting to narrate all kinds of comedies and dramas, or a combination of both genres: tragicomedy in film and in life.
