BIUTIFUL

Gentle Readers,

I don't complete understand Biutiful, and no, sillies, it's not because the movie is in Spanish. What I couldn't pick up from listening I could read in the subtitles.

The movie begins as Uxbal (Javier Bardem) learns he has prostate cancer too advanced to be treated. He has a few months to live. Uxbal is a black marketeer, pero es une hombre muy mal con une corazon del oro.

He has two children he cares for quite lovingly. Uxbal briefly reunites with his ex-wife Marambra (Maricel Alvarez), but he soon discovers she is too unstable to be trusted with the children.

The life of a black marketeer is not an easy one. After 25 illegal Chinese immigrants die because of Uxbal, he descends into a miasma of the surreal in a disco that includes a number of scantily clad women performing on ropes hanging from the ceiling. One of the women has nipples on her butt as if each cheek is a breast. Now I've heard of women with an extra nip on the chest, but I've never heard of a woman with butt nips. I think the unreal nips are there to suggest how unreal Uxbal's life has become. It's his fault these people are dead, and he's dying himself.

There's also an interesting sub-plot (this movie has tons of stuff going on) about Uxbal being able to receive messages from the dead.

I'm pleased to report that Javier Bardem has lovely hair in this movie. No weird wig or do or whatever that was when he was the incredibly creepy bad buy in No Country For Old Men, an excellent film for which Bardem won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. Bardem has quite a beautiful chiseled face with kind of droopy sexy brown eyes and a hot bod, although he becomes more grey and gaunt as the Grim Reaper looms.

Bardem was nominated for best actor for Biutiful, which also received a best foreign language film nomination. I don't know what movie won, but it must have been awfully good to beat Biutiful.

I don't really understand the end of the movie. What happens to Marambra? Is Uxbal dead when he's watching an earlier scene of himself with his daughter? Why is Uxbal in the woods and what's going on? Do I not understand these points because I'm stupido or is it up the air because we don't know what happens when we die? Uxbal can't even be sure that the woman he asks to care for his children will do so.

But all in all, Biutiful is very well made and really quite biutiful. I think the ambiguity is there to keep us thinking and pondering what happens to the characters. Every now and then I enjoy seeing a movie I don't completely understand. It keeps films interesting and unique.

Infinities of love,

Lola

Uxbal: Look in my eyes. Look at my face. Remember me, please. Don't forget me, Ana. Don't forget me, my love, please.