Reviews

Much has been written elsewhere about whether or not Norman Jewison had an axe to grind in making this film. Also about the oddness of having the characters speak in English (can one, though, imagine Michael Caine talking in French? - and yet I personally found his portrayal of the aging, desperate, cruel, bigoted and, ultimately, pathetic Pierre Brossard extremely convincing - a much harder part to play than in, say, Educating Rita, Last Orders or The Quiet American). My overall impression about the direction of this film was that it was made primarily for the North-American commercial market. How else to explain the parochialism of captions such as "Marseille, South of France" or "Rome, Italy"? How else to explain the absence of basic research to avoid such unwittingly hilarious howlers as "corp trouvé" (instead of "corps...") or "coup de gras" (for "coup de grâce")? This is Hickville, Canada.

A brilliantly rich expression of the medium of painting through that of the cinema, a rare if not a unique achievement. Another reviewer refers to the "moving painting" of Peter Greenaway, and this film does indeed call to mind The Draughtsman's Contract. The dying painter relives in pictorial terms episodes of his life, artistic, political and personal, in between asking himself the questions "Where am I?" ("¿Donde estoy?"), lost in the streets of Bordeaux at the beginning of the film, and "Who am I now?" ("¿Quién soy ahora?"), as he lies on his death-bed, the two Spanish verbs distinguishing between the physical being and the existential one. The film is articulated to a large degree by Goya's three sources of inspiration, Velázquez (space), Rembrandt (light) and the imagination, but more by Goya's apocalyptic portrayals of the suffering of the Spanish in the Napoleonic Wars after the disillusionment of the French Enlightenment. Goya en Burdeos is to painting what Babettes Gæstebud and The Dead are to the celebratory feast.