It also had a very memorable line: if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.
His (Inarritu's) next two films tried very hard to be about the interrelatedness of us all and had very big names and exotic locations in them.
21 Grams and Babel were very much butterfly effect movies – what happens outside Casablanca affects what happens in New York via Tokyo - and they were insufferably serious. For all their internationalism, they were also quite forgettable.
Inarritu’s fourth film is even more serious and grim, but that grimness is at least informed by a Catalunian fatalism, which might be another reason why it’s everything but forgettable. In fact, it’s a masterpiece because you don’t come out of the cinema weeping or depressed but renewed, alive. That makes it a modern tragedy.
Javier Bardem plays Uxbal, a man who lives in a city we only later discover is Barcelona. His life is so desperately focused on the lower-class here and now that there is no time for pretty cityscapes. It is not a part of the city the Olympic committee or Fifa would want you to see.
With his big head, recalling countless Picasso-esque minotaurs, Uxbal operates on various levels. First of all, he’s a father. He has a daughter and younger son, who constantly wets his bed. This is not a happy, unified unit.
Mama, it transpires, is not just a ditz. She is bipolar. The one moment she is a beautiful, passionate, caring woman. The next she is a smoking motor mouth who is sleeping with Uxbal’s brother, among others. The poor woman cannot help herself. She is not reliable or consistent. It’s a mesmerising, compassionate performance by Maricel Alvarez.
So a Chinese woman with a baby looks after the kids after school. Her life is not a bed of roses either.
Uxbal is a go-between. He organizes work for unqualified and illegal Chinese immigrants (hence the babysitter) on construction sites and takes his cut. He then pays a sickeningly corrupt cop his cut. That cop is not a fat,greasy Spaniard. He is repulsive in that he is sleek, macho, red-haired, unshaven, sexy. The married Chinese boss, too, is not just a sexless, aloof exploiter. He’s having a rampant affair with another man.
Uxbal also organizes work and accommodation for African migrants. Again, he takes his cut; he has a family to feed. A police raid on the migrants trading illegally in a square brilliantly captures the utter chaos - and racism - of such a venture.
If Uxbal is a businessman, then he tends to care a little about those he’s exploiting. He engages with them, too, passionately. That is more than most can say. When economics drive his basic compassion too much the consequences are horrific.
But he is also a spiritual go-between. People pay him to convey their late, deceased loved ones’ last thoughts and wishes. In turn, he goes to his guide, a clear-eyed, older woman who tells him he knows what he must do. He knows he is dying and he knows he must get his affairs in order. Sane, hard, psychic advice.
If his son is wetting his pants because of his mother, then Uxbal is wetting his pants from prostate cancer. To not mention this fact would be feeding the myth of that particular disease (though Uxbal might be a bit young for it).
After all, did Elizabethans attend Hamlet to see why he’s so upset or did they go to see how he handles his father’s murder? For that matter, does one die “after losing a long battle with cancer”, or do you celebrate a life which, like all things, ended, one way or the other? Hence Biutiful.
However, no amount of spiritual knowledge is enough to console Uxbal that his two children will be alright. His father also died when he was young, running from the dictator, Franco. It’s not pretty but, again, it’s real.
The way Inarritu solves Uxbal’s desperate dilemma is as simple and profound an observation about Africa as the makers In a Better World couldn’t even begin to imagine.
Only about three-quarters of a way through the film do we see the church of the Sagrada Familia, the sacred family, incomplete, a work of art in progress, beautiful. Like Uxbal’s family, like Uxbal, who can’t spell that word, like a man, like all of us.
If Inarritu’s characters were all over the world in his previous two movies, now the world comes to them, to Uxbal, in Barcelona. One individual as the world is less pretentious, more real and somewhat cheaper than trying to out-location James Bond.
If the film could do with a few minor cuts here and there - and a little humour, even for Catalonia - then Bardem’s perfectly directed performance is still one of a lifetime in a truly great work of cinema.
Neil Sonnekus
* Bardem was nominated for an Oscar and won the best actor award at Cannes.
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