In a Better World… not Biutiful.

Another submission for the International Section of this week's issue of The Cambridge Student, which was not published since most of the space was devoted to oncoming CUSU elections.. enjoy!

In a Better World… not Biutiful.

By Noor-Hal Cuellar

On February 27^th, 2011 the 83rd Academy Awards ceremony took place in the Kodak Theatre, in L.A., and within all the film entities that were honored by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) the award for the Best Foreign Film was granted to the film “In a Better World” a Danish production which portrays the story of a boy named Elias living in a small town in Denmark, whose Swedish roots, plus wearing a dental retainer equals frequent poundings for him, aside from his own personal struggles due to his parents’ separation. His idolized father is an advocate of turning the other cheek, an altruistic doctor who is often absent due to his volunteer services at an African refugee camp. Within this situation, a new kid called Christian intervenes and defends him, making them to create a strong bond that could lead not to a good end.

Rather than giving another movie review, I would like to emphasize the motivations behind the idea of making this film. In my opinion, “In a better world” shows the current complex reality on many households of our society. Even though the film in several moments confuses purposefulness with deepness, since it dwells a lot into the former but loses grip on the latter. However, with the portrait of two different realities being witnessed by Anton, Elias’s father, and the escalating anti-social behavior of Christian, holistically the message given is that the tendency toward the animalistic is present in us all, even the idyllic scheme known as the Denmark society. And this holds true if we reviewed the origin of this film that was started as a discussion between the director, Susanne Bier, and the screenwriter, Anders T. Jensen, about the perception of Denmark as a quite harmonious society. Then, the idea was to develop a plot when the dramatic turns of events would break the idyllic image of a blissful place. This entire together, plus several other ingredients like the cinematography capturing the harsh beauty of African landscapes, made it the kind of prestige film that would perfectly fit into the Academy’s sensibilities. And it obviously did.

Even though the rest of the nominees were movies with high standards of quality, I would like to talk about “Biutiful” which was clearly a favorite of the critics. And also it was strongly expected since his leading actor, Academy Award winner Javier Bardem gave an overpowering performance as a troubled middle-aged poor guy and got a nomination as Best Leading Actor, category whose strong candidate to win was Colin Firth for “The King’s Speech”. Even though it shows the less glamorous face from Barcelona, and its attempt at a globalist aesthetic of compassion at a certain extent gets too pretentious, Biutiful is clearly an impressive sample of Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu film-making he has shown in previous movies as 21 grams and Babel. By showing the other side of the dazzling and idyllic Gaudí reality, full of exploited immigrants living in turbulent suburbs and far from the perfect tourist destination scheme, Iñarritu goes beyond his previous work focused in entangling disparate lives together by a random event, and jumps into a different sort of magic naturalism.

All these factors were heavily considered by the Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to be chosen as the Mexican submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a decision quite controversial, since the plot takes place in Spain, and there was another strong candidate which was submitted to the Spanish Goya Awards, a film named “Hell”, which was quite polemic, since it is a political satire about the drug trafficking in Mexico. However, the reception the film had all around the world, as well as the successful background of Bardem and Iñarritu quite justified the Mexican Academy selection.

Nevertheless, it was not enough to beat the holistic scheme portrayed by “In a better world”. Even more because I reckon that the situations reflected in Bier’s film can be applied in any other context on our reality, in any other country. Even there are societies more or less troubled than Denmark, the same tribulations can take place anywhere else.