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Dir: Milos Forman.
Cast: Natalie Portman, Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgard, Randy Quaid
Description: Forman's usually deft touch with period pieces deserts him in this lavish but hollow soap. Javier Bardem plays the Spanish artist, whose life becomes intertwined with the exploits of the Inquisition and the rise of Napoleon.
Country: SP. 2006. 113mins
Holding the baby: Natalie Portman joins a stellar cast in Goya's Ghosts
Every film-maker ought to be allowed one long-gestated folly, and this is Milos Forman's. It's about the life and - more specifically - the times of the great Spanish painter Francisco Goya, and travels from 1792, when the Spanish Inquisition was still operating, into the early 19th century, at the time of Napoleon's invading army and finally the success against them of Wellington's troops.
Forman clearly sees this as a curiously similar period to that suffered by his own Czech homeland during his lifetime.
With cinematography to die for and costumes to match, it looks magnificent as a stellar cast pad through some lush interiors. But, despite being written by Jean-Claude Carrière, whom Buñuel used so well, Goya's Ghosts stomps through history like an elephant rather than a gazelle.
Stellan Skarsgard plays Goya as a rather nice old chap who looks upon what happens with an eye for the main chance and some sympathy for both God and the Devil. God is represented by Michel Lonsdale's Cardinal who is persuaded that "putting the Question" (ie torture) is the way to rid Spain of heresy.
The Devil is Javier Bardem's monk, who arrests the pretty daughter (Natalie Portman) of a rich merchant, has her tortured for eating pork, and comforts her in prison so thoroughly that she has a baby by him and goes mad. Meanwhile, Goya appeals to the nice old King (Randy Quaid) to do something about it. By then, however, the French invasion is at hand and Napoleon's idiot brother is about to be placed on the throne.
It's like watching a series of moving historical tableaux while actors speak lines reminiscent of the more naïve school broadcasts that used to dispense history on Radio 4.
They do their best, and Bardem in particular is far more sinister than any of the villains in Spider-Man 3. But you soon begin to wonder what on earth Forman, maker of the classic Blonde in Love and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, thinks he's doing. The whole thing creaks along like an anaemic snail.
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