The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (26 page)

Javier Bardem
, b. Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain 1969
Bardem comes from a movie family: his mother, Pilar, was sister to Juan Antonio Bardem, the Spanish director of the 1950s. As such—in comedy and drama, as himself or in five-hour makeup—Javier Bardem had done everything by 2007, slipping away from his early reputation as a stud and pursuing some of the most searching character studies in modern cinema. No matter—there are children now all over the world, too young to have been admitted to
No Country for Old Men
(07, the Coen Brothers), who can do sinister limping and dead-voiced impersonations of his “Anton Chigurh,” with bicycle pumps as their version of his mysterious gun. And the man who was once an industrious, versatile Spanish actor is now an international figure, a nonchalant lover for Woody Allen, and likely to play Pablo Picasso—as well as any other inexplicable monster the world can think of.

He was doing television when he was still a kid before his breakthrough in the early 90s:
Las Edades de Lulú
(90, Bigas Luna);
High Heels
(91, Pedro Almodóvar);
Jamón, Jamón
(92, Luna). Thereafter, he did two or three films a year with these highlights:
El Amante Bilingüe
(93, Vicente Aranda);
Huevos de Oro
(93, Luna);
La Teta i la Lluna
(94, Luna);
El Detective y la Muerte
(94, Gonzalo Suárez);
La Madre
(95, Miguel Bardem), with his real mother;
Boca a Boca
(95, Manuel Gómez Pereira);
Mambrú
(96, Pedro Pérez Jiménez);
Éxtasis
(96, Mariano Barrosso);
Airbag
(97, Juanma Bajo Ulloa);
Live Flesh
(07, Almodóvar);
Dance with the Devil
(97, Alex de la Iglesia)—from a Barry Gifford script;
Entre la Piernas
(99, Pereira);
Second Skin
(99, Gerardo Vera).

He then delivered a memorable performance as the writer Reinaldo Arenas, in
Before Night Falls
(00, Julian Schnabel), and got an Oscar nomination. He was in
The Dancer Upstairs
(02, John Malkovich);
Los Lunes al Sol
(02, Fernando León de Aranoa);
Collateral
(04, Michael Mann); as a quadriplegic in
Mar Ardento
(04, Alejandro Amenábar); the scoundrel in
Goya’s Ghosts
(06, Milos Forman);
Love in the Time of Cholera
(07, Mike Newell); as maybe Allen’s least inhibited male in
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
(08, Woody Allen);
Biutiful
(09, Alejandro González Iñárritu).

Juan Antonio Bardem
(1922–2002), b. Madrid, Spain
1949:
Paseo Sobre una Guerra Antigua
(codirected with Luis Garcia Berlanga). 1950:
Barajas, Aeropuerto Internacional
. 1953:
Ena Pareja Feliz
(codirected with Berlanga);
Novio a la Vista
(codirected with Berlanga). 1954:
Cómicos; Felices Pascuas
. 1955:
Muerte de un Ciclista/Death of a Cyclist
. 1956:
Calle Mayor
. 1957:
La Muerte de Pio Baroja
(unreleased). 1958:
La Venganza
. 1959:
Sonatas
. 1960:
A las Cinco de la Tarde
. 1962:
Los Inocentes
. 1963:
Nunca Pasa Nada
. 1965:
Los Pianos Mecánicos
. 1969:
El Último Día de la Guerra
. 1972:
La Corrupción de Chris Miller
. 1973:
L’Isola Misteriosa e il Capitano Nemo
. 1976:
El Puente
. 1978:
Seven Days in January 1977
. 1987:
Lorca, la Muerte de un Poeta
. 1993:
El Joven Picasso
(d). 1998:
Resultado Final
.

Death of a Cyclist
attracted some attention in the mid-1950s; its melodramatic accomplishment was too readily identified as a new vitality in Spanish cinema. The fact is that Spanish cinema had been no more than an assortment of oddities that had managed to slip past the Spanish authorities. Buñuel’s absence hung over Spain:
Las Hurdes, Viridiana
, and
Tristana
make a trio of night raids on sleeping territory. Bardem worked by daylight and seems callow in comparison. He was an actor, drawn into filmmaking through his contact with Berlanga.
Death of a Cyclist
was fatalistic, socially observant, and as terse as Lucia Bose’s central performance. But Spain cries out for insane images: peasants eating poison; the depraved last supper; the sensuality of Tristana’s artificial limb. It is a European country on the edge of the Third World—like Ireland—and the contrast is surreal. Bardem, at best, was a realist, helplessly copying American shock cuts. The distance that a pedestrian may lag behind is shown by the fact that
Calle Mayor
—made in 1956—was a version of the stolid naturalism of Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
.

Brigitte Bardot
b. Paris, 1934
There is no clearer sign of the critical quality of Godard’s art than
Contempt
(63), a film that, among other things, gave her most significant place in cinema history to Brigitte Bardot.
Contempt
is not just a commentary on the Godardian consciousness married to an actress, but a prediction of the eventual rupture between Godard and his own wife, Anna Karina. It is part of Godard’s skill that he chose to make this personal statement—what Raoul Coutard called “a letter to his wife”—out of his most orthodox and expensive film. But it was appropriate that this story of an attempt to make a Cinecittá
Odyssey
should itself be a Carlo Ponti/Joseph Levine production, based with some fidelity on a novel by Alberto Moravia. While Bardot was a commercial imposition, her presence may have enabled Godard to be more open in admitting his fears and in revealing that element of misogyny that recurs in his films. His first film in CinemaScope,
Contempt
opens with a magnificent reclining nude Bardot, shocking and scathing in terms of the sexual reticence of his other work. That scene, in which Bardot and Michel Piccoli describe Bardot’s opulent but worthless nakedness, is a reference to the way Roger Vadim’s camera had once stripped her bare. But it is also a pointer to the fact that Godard hardly removed a garment from Karina. Paradoxically, the admiring CinemaScope lavishness of all that creamy shoulder, back, bottom, and thigh is contemptuous. This was Godard’s way of honoring the contract: that to use BB was to include an obligatory nude scene.

All of which is to say that the worldwide reputation of Bardot is the creation of those French magazines, of Vadim’s lubricity, of the sociology of Simone de Beauvoir, and of Bardot’s original epitome of the youthful sexuality that tanned itself on the Côte d’Azur once the austerity of war had worn off. Her actual screen appeal was as a brunette, pouting but smiling, and with a perfect body that she was casually willing to display. The attempt of her first husband Roger Vadim to advertise his own advantages through her seemed to exhaust her. She quickly turned blond and her eyes grew heavy fake lashes. Her face and smile seemed pumped up and only exposed the weird lack of personality or intelligence. There is an awful sadness in her return to Vadim for
Don Juan or if Don Juan Were a Woman
(73).

From modeling, she broke into films in the mid-1950s:
Le Trou Normand
(52, Jean Boyer);
Futures Vedettes
(54, Marc Allégret); very appealing in
Summer Manoeuvres
(55, René Clair); to England for
Doctor at Sea
(55, Ralph Thomas);
La Lumière d’en Face
(55, Georges Lacombe);
Cette Sacrée Gamine
(55, Michel Boisrond);
Helen of Troy
(55, Robert Wise);
Mio Figlio Nerone
(56, Steno);
Mamzelle Striptease
(56, Allégret);
And God Created Woman
(56, Vadim)—the film that made her an international sensation;
Heaven Fell That Night
(57, Vadim);
Une Parisienne
(57, Boisrond);
Love Is My Profession
(58, Claude Autant-Laura);
La Femme et le Pantin
(58, Julien Duvivier);
Babette S’En Va-t-en Guerre
(59, Christian-Jaque);
La Bride sur le Cou
(59, Jean Aurel and Vadim); monotonous in the “serious” acting role of
La Vérité
(60, Henri-Georges Clouzot); and then in the curiously self-pitying
Vie Privée
(62, Louis Malle), which was a polite and inane picture of some of her own anguish at being a sex object;
Warrior’s Rest
(62, Vadim), which was the most baroque celebration of her as a sex object;
Une Ravissante Idiote
(63, Edouard Molinaro); jerky and nervous in
Viva María!
(65, Malle);
Dear Brigitte
(65, Henry Koster); seen briefly on the Metro in
Masculin-Feminin
(66, Godard);
A Coeur Joie
(67, Serge Bourguignon); in the “William Wilson” episode from
Histoires Extraordinaires
(67, Malle);
Shalako
(68, Edward Dmytryk);
Les Femmes
(69, Aurel);
L’Ours et La Poupée
(69, Michel Deville);
Les Novices
(70, Guy Casaril);
Boulevard de Rhum
(71, Robert Enrico);
Les Pétroleuses
(71, Christian-Jaque).
Il Somiso del Grande Tentatore
(75, Damiano Damiani).

Boris Barnet
(1902–65), b. Moscow
1926:
Miss Mend
(codirected with Fedor Otsep). 1927:
Devushka s Korobkoi/The Girl with the Hat Box; Moskva v Oktyabre/ Moscow in October
. 1928:
Dom na Trubnoi/ The House on Trubnaya Street
. 1931:
Lyodolom/Thaw
. 1933:
Okraina/Outskirts
. 1936:
U Samogo Sinego Morya/ By the Bluest of Seas
(codirected with S. Mrdonov). 1939:
Noch v Sentyabre/ A Night in September
. 1940:
Stayi Nayezhdnik/The Old Jockey
. 1945:
Odnazhdi Nochyu/ One Night
. 1947:
Podvig Razvedchika/Exploits of an Intelligence Agent
. 1948:
Stranitsy Zhizni/ Pages of Life
(codirected with A. Macheret). 1951:
Shchedroye Leto/Bountiful Summer
. 1952:
Kontsert Masterov Ukrainskogo Iskusstva/Concert of the Masters of Ukrainian Art
. 1955:
Lyana
. 1956:
Poet: 1957: Borets i Kloun/ The Wrestler and the Clown
(codirected with K. Yudin). 1961:
Alenka
. 1963:
Polustanok/ Whistle Stop
.

On a Sunday evening in December 2009, there it was in the Turner Classic Movies schedule, starting at 9 p.m. and ending after one o’clock on the Monday morning
—Miss Mend
, by Barnet and Otsep. Imagine a Mabuse epic shot by Howard Hawks and Delmer Daves on the streets, at the seashore, and in the oddest buildings imaginable. This is a Soviet film, made a year after
Potemkin
, but it is no doctrinaire study in montage—it’s a film about space and light, humor, heroes and girls with amazingly withdrawn, high-angle shots (this is why I mentioned Daves) and all manner of engaging eccentric acting (in the Russian tradition) that serve to open up the world of adventure, rather than draw it closer on every nervous breath (Lang and Mabuse).

The grandson of an English printer who settled near Moscow, Barnet attended the Moscow School of Art and Architecture and joined the Red Army in 1918. He was a boxer and an actor and he is very appealing in several of his own films as well as in
The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks
(24, Lev Kuleshov) and
Storm Over Asia
(29, V. I. Pudovkin). He was a member of Kuleshov’s workshop and can be seen in several of their films.

But nothing prepares one for the exhilarating surprise of
Miss Mend
—it is an uninhibited adventure film with undertones of menacing world conspiracies. Indeed, it shows a hard, dangerous world, but absolutely free from Lang’s foreboding. The heroes in Barnet and Otsep are American in their optimism and energy. They love disguise, nervy brave girls (it’s Natalia Glan as Miss Mend herself), fisticuffs, chases, and, above all, the sea and the way the light plays on it.
Miss Mend
is a three-part serial, an authentic action film, and I can only say that when at last I saw it (at the age of sixty-eight) it was a revelation.

The Girl with the Hat Box
is a comedy full of real location work and delivering a performance by Anna Sten that begins to explain why people like Goldwyn were crazy about her—not that they could reproduce her vivacity in America.
House on Trubnaya Street
(with Vera Maretskaya as another great female lead) is about a huge tenement, with the camera getting in everywhere.
Thaw
is said to be an amazing, lyric love story set against fights between kulaks and peasants.
By the Bluest of Seas
is another comedy—with Yelena Kuzmina, while
Outskirts
is a major work, a sound picture set during the First World War and following a love story and fraternization.

It is said that his films of the 1940s and 50s are far less satisfying—and we know that Barnet committed suicide eventually in the feeling not that he was an enemy of the state but just because he had lost his talent. We need to know more and see more of the films, but on the strength of
Miss Mend
and
Outskirts
I can promise you that time spent with Boris Barnet is repaid—with interest.

Bruno Barreto
, b. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1955
1973:
Tati, a Garoto
. 1976:
Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos/Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
. 1978:
Amor Bandido
. 1981:
Lucia
. 1983:
Gabriela
. 1984:
Felizes para Sempre
. 1990:
A Show of Force
. 1992:
The Story of Fausta
. 1995:
Carried Away
. 1997:
O Que E Isso, Companheiro?/Four Days in September
. 1998:
One Tough Cop
. 1999:
Bossa Nova
. 2002:
View from the Top
. 2005:
Romeo & Juliet Get Married
. 2007:
Caixa Doís
. 2008:
Última Parada 174
.