Recently seen films: Goya's Ghosts by Milos Forman, and The Departed by Martin Scorsese.

Goya's Ghosts was interesting and, incidentally, not a Goya biopic, though he is one of the three main characters, but I doubt the film will be very successful: it resolutely avoids characters to identify with or easy conclusions. As a picture of Spain through three regimes - Bourbon, French Occupation, Restored-by-English-Troops-Restoration - it is pretty grim, though I doubt anyone familiar with Goya's paintings will go in expecting something else. Forman uses Goya mostly as an observer, which caused more than one critic here in Germany to remark the film ought to be called Lorenzo's Ghosts, Lorenzo being the, for lack of a better term, villain who gets most of Forman's storytelling attention. He starts out as your usual fanatic (though intelligent in his fanaticism) Inquisitor lusting for our young heroine, until getting in trouble himself; once the French are there, he's an equally as fanatic proponent of Enlightenment and in authority again, and yet is actually the fact he won't turn his coat a third time and is capable of less than dastardly deeds which allows fate to finally catch up with him. Forman doesn't glamourize him; the scene where Lorenzo exploits Ynez is staged as absolutely repellent. But you can tell he's trying for something more than a boo-hiss villain, especially in the scene where Goya finally has it out with Lorenzo, accusing him of the various misdeeds committed throughout the film, and Lorenzo replies that all this might be true but at least he tried to change things, both as Inquisitor and later in the service of Enlightenment, tried to change humanity whereas Goya was content to observe and paint whoever was in charge without being convinced of their cause.

Ynez, the female character, is played by Natalie Portman who is terrific in the later part of the movie when we see Ynez after fifteen years imprisonment being released during the French occupation. For once, a movie allows a beautiful actress to actually look how someone would after this treatment, and the body language fits the ruined body, conveying the destroyed personality with flickers of memories coming now and then perfectly. (Portman also has a small spoilery other role in which she's very good as well.)

It's very consciously a movie of our times: most blatantly, of course, in the scene when Napoleon (only seen in this one scene, and only from behind) tells his soldiers that liberating Spain from benighted tyranny should be a piece of cake, and that there will be flowers in the streets awaiting them by the grateful Spaniards. (This is probably the only time Dubya ever gets associated with Napoleon in popular culture...) There is also the meta question of what art can and artists can do anyway, with the depressing answer basically given at the start in the very first scene, when the various members of the Inquisition have a look at Goya's drawings, are disturbed and wonder whether one shouldn't arrest the guy, and Lorenzo says no, because ultimately those drawings do not make a difference. (He then goes on to argue that the point is what Goya is depicting and that they ought to change the obviously rotten state of humanity shown here by going back to the stricter rules of the old days, so there you go.) And it doesn't offer much hope for political changes; the restoration at the end, courtesy of Wellington, is presented as no better than either of the two regimes that came before. The only hope the movie does offer is in the personal: Ynez, in her madness, finding someone to care for, and Goya continuing to depict and follow, in vain or not. I don't think I'll watch it again any time soon, but I certainly found it worth seeing.

***


I know The Departed is a remake of a Hongkong movie, Infernal Affairs, but as I haven't seen the later I can only judge it on its own merits. Oddly, the big Scorsese classics like Taxi Driver never appealed to me as much as his later films like Aviator. The Departed struck me as good, suspenseful noir, with Scorsese getting good performances out of everybody and somehow managing to use Jack Nicholson's over-the-top-ness as a believable character element that doesn't unbalance the movie (I'm looking at you, Tim Burton). I wouldn't cry Oscar material just yet (whereas I thought Aviator was), but it's definitely compelling cinema. Extra points for making the female character - a minor, but important role - feel an essential part of the story instead of an artificially inserted love interest.