The Beloved

Filmmaking dads and their actress daughters are having a moment, and this fabulous filmmaking odyssey from Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen is an even richer affair than this year’s Oscar-winner Sentimental Value. As movies about movies go, The Beloved is darker than Truffaut’s Day for Night and as self-scouring as Godard’s Le Mépris, two masterpieces to which comparisons don’t feel entirely outlandish.

It’s complex material handled with elegance by Sorogoyen (The Beasts) and supercharged by Bardem, whose meatiest Spanish-language role in years, playing a volatile filmmaker who uses his new project as a chance to reconnect with his estranged daughter, is a real sidewinder of a performance. All easy charm and coiled, Bond-villain menace, he’s a complex, self-regarding man whose moods change with the weather and whose motivations are fatally at loggerheads.

Bardem is Spanish director Esteban Martínez, once an enfant terrible of indie cinema in the manner of a Quentin Tarantino or David O Russell, and famous for punching his own leading actor during his tearaway days. He’s supposedly mellowed enough to take on his most ambitious project yet: a period drama called ‘Desert’ about Spain’s Western Sahara colony set in 1932 and filmed in the baking heat of the Canary Islands. Even his wary producer isn’t so sure. 

A 20-minute opening scene reunites him with daughter Emilia (Bitter Christmas’s Victoria Luengo) in a Madrid restaurant. One of two extraordinary set pieces that turn meals into crucibles of emotion and stress, it introduces The Beloved’s central tension: Esteban wants the inexperienced Emilia to play the lead in ‘Desert’. ‘It’s a story about people who can’t stand to look at each other,’ he says, struggling to hold her gaze. Through this process, he thinks he can make good on his own neglect of her and the wife he left behind. As the camera moves closer and closer, the awkwardness is amped up with unearned intimacy.

Victoria Luengo is excellent as the fraying Emilia

Obviously, the place to resolve lingering emotional rancour and family feuding is not a film set in the desert. Luengo is excellent as the fraying Emilia, a rabbit-in-the-headlights presence during filming, who retreats to her hotel room to slug beers at night. The boundaries between the pair shift like sands as he introduces her to his wife and young kids on a weekend visit to the Canaries. Emilia’s fear of being seen as a nepo baby, her imposter syndrome and sense of abandonment are spelt out in fidgety body language and wounded glances. Why does Esteban want her for the role anyway? Esteban explains that he admired her in a TV police procedural, before offering a list of criticisms of the show (it’s a great in-joke: Sorogoyen is the co-creator of hit Spanish cop show Riot Police starring – you guessed it – Luengo).

Co-written with his long-time collaborator Isabel Peña, the screenplay offers a complex dance between dad and daughter, each trying not to relitigate the past. Sorogoyen overdoes the formal trickery at times, with distracting switches to black and white, but effectively blurs the lines between the two films at others. The sweeping score to ‘Desert’, when its labouring composer eventually delivers it, articulates Emilia’s emotions as she takes lonely walks through the volcanic landscape. 

The Beloved is a fabulous film about filmmaking, and an astute and hard-hitting one about family dynamics. It’s also a great argument that the two should be kept apart at all times. 

The Beloved premiered at the Cannes film festival.