Official Competition

The title of poker-faced comedy Official Competition gestures at its movie milieu – it’s about a film director rehearsing her next project with her two leading men, and ends with their film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival – but it also signals its preoccupations: Competition. Ego. Pettiness. The general and specific awfulness of humans. Like I said, a comedy.

Penélope Cruz’s magnificent frizzed wig deserves a Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy nom all on its own. Every other award we should reserve for Cruz herself; she’s always been dazzling but has grown even more confident, more emphatic in the third decade of her career. Here, she plays Lola, an arty, award-winning director mounting an adaptation of a prestigious novel. (The funding, by the way, comes from an octogenarian pharmaceutical CEO who wants to be remembered – nay, lionized – and decides movie glory beats having his name on a bridge. Like I said, ego.) To play the book’s at-odds brothers, Lola hires a preening action megastar named Félix (Banderas) and a jaded artiste named Iván (Martínez). Every day, the three rehearse in a largely abandoned, hulking shell of a building, the ostensible office for the CEO’s purely ornamental philanthropic foundation. There, they run demoralizing acting exercises in this creepy, spare setting and set each other’s teeth on edge, finding ever new ways to test out Sartre’s “hell is other people” theory.

Iván may be the best of them, but he’s still insufferable, the kind of guy who practices not his speech accepting an Oscar but his speech rejecting an Oscar. That’s a real joke from the film – I found it quite amusing – but I should say, for me, the humor throughout tops out at bemusement. (The script is credited to co-directors Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat as well as Andrés Duprat.) The tantalizing presence of Banderas and Cruz – who both became international stars in Almódovar films – made me wistful for a touch of the ecstatic slapstick of that director’s early work. Spiritually, Official Competition’s closer point of comparison may be the films of Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure), which similarly chronicle humans at their worst (gawwww, humans really are the worst) with visual wit and from a wry remove. In the case of Official Competition, that includes Cruz staring down the camera as she performs the floss with a heroic focus. I haven’t stopped thinking about that shot for a full week. Brava.

Don't miss our interview with Penelope Cruz about bad directors, learning to stand up to on-set abuse, and the importance of a good wig, "Penélope Cruz Enters the Rehearsal Room for Official Competition," July 1.