Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat’s Official Competition strips cinema down to its essence. This is another film about filmmaking, but it escapes hermeticism by homing in on actors and acting—not just the profession but the existential condition of having to perpetually convince each other (and ourselves) of our significance.
Official Competition begins with Humberto Suàrez (José Luis Gómez), an entrepreneur of some sort, realizing on his 80th birthday that he lacks prestige despite his obscene wealth. Initially, he mulls over financing a bridge and handing it over it to the state in his name. Then, very much on a whim, he decides that producing a film would be better. Never mind that he knows nothing about films. He supposes that adapting the best talent that money can buy will not only assure the film’s critical success but also accentuate his importance.
With this in mind, Humberto buys the rights to a Nobel Prize-winning novel, Rivalry, and hires acclaimed arthouse director Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz) to adapt it for the screen. In a scene fusing sly humor and attention-grabbing cinematic artifice with a startling pathos, Lola reveals her plan to cast blockbuster star Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas) against actor’s actor Ivàn Torres (Oscar Martínez) as the novel’s disputing brothers. She then summarizes the novel’s plot for Humberto, who’s “not much of a reader,” as he spoons an extravagant sundae.
Lola gets caught up in her own retelling and a close-up reveals her rapt expression as Erik Satie’s proto-ambient “Gnossienne: No. 1” glides over the soundtrack. Humberto, too, succumbs to the story’s spell, a spoonful of ice cream poised inches from his mouth. Just before she tells the entrepreneur how the novel ends, Lola takes a breath and Cohn and Duprat cut to an exterior shot of her house. We see her gestures through the window but hear only the eerie chords of Satie’s composition. The scene exemplifies Cohn and Duprat’s sense of humor and deployment of static camera to heighten the still-life geometries of their shot compositions. At the same time, it provides nearly the entire plot of Official Competition’s film-within-the-film, or, rather, a skeletal outline waiting to be fleshed out.
Soon, Humberto all but disappears from the film as Lola cultivates a latent rivalry between Félix and Ivàn, subjecting them to all manner of ego-lacerating exercises, such as having them read a tense scene while seated under a massive boulder suspended from a crane. The boulder, a performer in its own right, turns out to be a cardboard prop. As viewers, we’re shown none of the film-within-the-film, only the rehearsals that take place entirely in Lola’s starkly minimalist house. This invitation to us to imagine a film solely on the basis of acting inevitably recalls Lars von Trier’s Dogville and Peter Watkins’s La Commune (Paris, 1871).
Like a stage production, Official Competition lives and dies on the strength of its actors. The struggle of egos between its three protagonists, each dysfunctional in their own way, plateaus around two thirds of the way into the film. Even so, Cruz in particular strikes a captivating balance between the expressive and the inscrutable, as her character all-too-expertly manipulates the self-obsessed Félix and Ivàn, even at the expense of her adaptation. By the end of Cohn and Duprat’s film, real and fictional rivalries violently collide.
Disarmingly funny, Official Competition nonetheless offers its audience a reminder, simultaneously entrancing and disconcerting, that sometimes our eagerness to be convinced of a story grows in inverse proportion to its verisimilitude, until eagerness verges on desperation. This tendency, moreover, isn’t limited to the confines of the screen. It’s a reminder, too, of the conflicting roles we play within ourselves.
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