Gastón Duprat & Mariano Cohn’s “Official Competition”
Official Competition (Competencia oficial) (2021)
In a year full of satire, this wins out with a sharp and witty script, outstanding performances and great humour that plays out like a combination of Fellini’s “8½” and Frank Oz’s “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” with an Almodovar sensibility
Argentinian directing duo Gastón Duprat & Mariano Cohn have created an “Inception”-like, razor-sharp satire of society told principally through the production of a film commissioned by ageing multi-millionaire Humberto Suárez(José Luis Gómez) who wants to be remembered as being more than just a millionaire. Buying the rights to a Nobel-Prize winning novel Rivalry, which tells the story of two brothers in conflict, Suárez hires Palme d’Or winner Lola Cuevas played with relish by Penélope Cruz who settles upon bringing two actors who are polar opposites into the lead role of the brothers: Félix Rivero(Antonio Banderas), a womanising, high flying Spanish actor who frequently works in Hollywood and Iván Torres(Oscar Martínez) who runs a method acting school, doesn’t believe in awards and has been married for several years.
The movie takes place almost entirely during the rehearsals in preparation for filming with Lola, Félix and Iván forming a tense triangle with particular animosity between the two lead actors. Banderas and Martínez’s competing egos make for some great comedy moments and neither avoids getting skewered by the biting script. In fact, everyone get skewered in one way or another and that even reaches out to us, the audience, questioning how we watch and judge movies to be good or bad.
Indulge me a moment while I take a slight detour from the review as that last point brings up something I noticed while building up my own list of the top films of 2022 for Two Oceans. To ensure I had seen as many films as possible, I looked at several lists of “top films” of 2022 and generally speaking, those lists created by single reviewers tended to be quite homegenised in terms of genre(often drama), weight, and even budgets. That said, there are signs attitudes are changing as genre films start getting a peak into these lists but they are still the exception. In “Official Competition” Lola questions how we judge films pointing out that we don’t tend to like what we don’t understand and gravitate toward the more familiar which makes us even more entrenched.
Now, Lola is presented as an eccentric auteur with unusual and extreme methods. She has hair like a Biophilia-era Björk and her script looks more like a scrapbook with endless doodles and various items(cigarette butts, feathers, string, plasters) taped into its pages. Interestingly, gender plays a part in the dynamics between the three and she implies that the brothers, as much as they hate each other, have a common destiny like a pair of testicles.
If all of this sounds inaccessible, relax, it isn’t. The humour had me laughing out loud and the story is a like a combination of Fellini’s “8½” and Frank Oz’s “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”. The tone reminded me of Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” as well as Almodovar. Having a knowledge or interest in filmmaking is a bonus but not core to what’s happening and the themes within the film are more universal than it first appears.
To wrap things up, it’s an intricately crafted hoot of a film. Every scene, every detail is there for a reason with a definitive pay off in the third act. I mentioned in my review for “Bodies Bodies Bodies” all the satirical films featuring a loathsome cast(“My Friends All Hate Me”, “The Menu”, “Triangle of Sadness”, “Glass Onion”) but this wins out as the best of the last year.
