When Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt was released last year, much of the negative discourse around it focused on its inherent lateness – a #MeToo style film with no evident modern turn, there was something odd about it, something deeply misjudged. For a short while halfway through Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved, I had a similar thought – Javier Bardem plays the unapologetic film director Esteban Martinez, who hires his estranged daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo, for whom the part was written) to star in his latest caper. For many of the first timers onset, there is talk of Esteban’s reputation and his history of violence, jested about, never completely believed, and conveniently veiled by his status as a cinematic genius. But it is clear to those frequent collaborators that this is, in fact, no joke, as Emilia, who has spent much of her life attempting to heal from the wounds left behind, once again comes face to face with the gifted but perilous figure of her father.
The beauty of The Beloved is in its craft, its detail – Sorogoyen has thought of everything, from the absence and abandonment of the desert through to the periodically black and white sequences, which seem to occur when a character faces a period of deepest sorrow. Yet, it also feels consistently improvised, almost as though Bardem and Luengo were actually related: the latter stated during the introductory Q&A at this year’s London Film Festival Gala that the first scene, running at eighteen minutes, was filmed without cuts over an hour and a half, and entirely improvised. Deeply effective, as Esteban goes from cushy to menacing when threatened with uncomfortable memories of the past, it pales compared to a scene onset, in which he becomes increasingly frustrated by his actors having a laughing fit and focuses his rage entirely on Emilia – how Sorogoyen weaves humour into something so unsettling and tragic is masterful. And it is here, in this incredible chemistry (or “non-chemistry”) that Bardem and Luengo devise, that The Beloved makes clear it is anything but a commentary on the toxicity of that male film director who takes and takes, pushes and shoves – it is about that father who does the very same, whose role as director merely feeds into the power imbalance that has existed since his daughter was a child. It is why neither this film nor Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value feel too late at all.
The Beloved screened at the London Film Festival and will be distributed in the UK by Curzon.
