Official Competition

Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas in Official Competition

Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn's Official Competition is that rarity, an intelligent and genuinely funny comedy. A farce about the backstage antics behind a movie, Official Competition mostly focuses on its three leads. Lola Cuevas (Penelope Cruz) is an avant garde film director who has the backing to produce an adaptation of a best-selling novel about two feuding brothers. She casts two actors with oppositional approaches as her leads. The roughhewn brother is played by Felix Rivero (Antonio Banderas), a top tier movie star who is an instinctual artist. The more restrained brother is played by Ivan Torres (Oliver Martinez), a polymath who takes a more academic approach. 

Naturally, these talented egoists clash. Torres honors study and preparation, Rivero lives for the moment, and Cuevas searches for a new artistic paradigms. The results are as heady as they are amusing. The two actors argue whether art is for the elite or the masses with Banderas and Martinez playing overinflated versions of themselves. Cruz has to do most of the heavy lifting as a square peg in a red wig of epic proportions. The boys gang up on Cuevas after each has been ritually humiliated by her. Allegiances are in perpetual flux, but, eventually, a film is created.

Significantly, Mr. Martinez, like the directorial duo, is from Argentina, a nuance lost on most North Americans, but one that has some bearing on the proceedings in Official Competition. Messrs. Duprat and Cohn have been artistic partners for over thirty years. They started out in the avant garde, have created numerous television programs, documentaries, and even founded a cultural TV channel in Buenos Aires. Official Competition is their third fictional feature and I will be chuffed to investigate their back catalogue.