La reine d'Espagne

It's the 1950s, and Arturo Ripstein is producing a movie in Spain with a mix of Hollywood and local talent. Spanish-born but now American flm star Penelope Cruz is the cast's lead. Except on the set, where director Clive Revill (playing a thinly disguised John Ford) doze in an alcoholic stupor, all is chaos, filled with gossip, affairs, and an attempted rescue of one of Miss Cruz' lovers from a political prison.

It's a sort of sequel to 1998's The Girl of Your Dreams, and it's very funny, a movie that looks like Kenneth Anger's fever dreams, and in which the actors think they can do things in reality as they do in the movies, so of course the cast includes Mandy Patinkin among the American cohort.

A second rate flick, made unpalatable by Trueba's childish political obsessions. Not that he is unique in such proclivities. Other countries have film industries, Spain "enjoys" an obscenely subsidized version of the Socorro Rojo.

24 October 2017. This is a movie that doesn't really offer up a distinct movie genre but sort of a blurry drama that the movie trailers promoted as a distinctive period comedy. Mandy Pantinkin as a movie producer has an Italian twin doppelganger in this movie starring Antonio Resines playing Blas Fontiveros, a former movie wonk who was thought dead but was placed in a military war camp during World War II and has come back to a changed state of both the film industry and his past personal relationships.

Cary Elwes as an actor Gary Jones portraying the King is over the top with his performance and his odd choice of a deep guttural voice. His presence as an extended cameo actually seems too distracting and so prominent as to off-balance all the rest of what's going on the movie while he's in a scene. Interestingly, it's possible that either Elwes was miscast in this movie or the character of Gary Jones was miscast in the movie within the movie. It's hard to tell. During the second quarter of the movie, it seems to drag off at times onto tangential and more boring scenes that don't have anything to do with the main storyline of the movie.

A fourth of the movie begins, unlike what the trailers suggest, is more about a former movie wonk, Blas, than the dynamic comedy-drama performance of Penelope Cruz. Which actually results in this moving seemingly having two parallel storyline occurring in one movie by the time Cruz manages to take command of her scenes. Resines' scenes are plodding and slow and uninspired. As for Penelope Cruz along with Mandy Pantinkin, they seem to be the only characters who can energize and bring a sparkle of interesting entertainment to the screen in the movie. Cruz has a lively, delicious presence on the screen. Her on-screen presence and her ability to diversify or reveal different characters is vivacious and electric as well as tender and heart-rending. Yet the cavalier attitude towards sexual conquests and affairs seems to find some contradiction in the apparent common acceptance in the movie which may be at odds with perhaps an American audience. Not that such sexual proclivity can't be filmed in a provocative and appealing way as Shirley MacLaine achieved in her Golden Globe nominated performance in Woman Times Seven (1967) about infidelity in France.

There's a wonderful singing scene being filmed midway through the movie that seems to capture a cinematographic ambiance that could have been the core of this movie, like other amazing character-driven movies about the film industry such as Saving Mr. Banks (2013) about the Mary Popping's story, the amazing retro-silent movie The Artist (2011), Michael Keeton's attempt at one continuous shot in Birdman (2014), or the biographical Hitchcock (2012).

Even so, this movie doesn't project a captivating tone or compelling or riveting performance. It is not an action thriller nor even a real period drama. It actually has more of a cut and paste tonality to it devoid of real urgency or emotional appeal, except for the last forth of the movie which turns somewhat a strange and less dramatic version of World War II dramatic thriller in The Great Escape (1963) even down to a supposedly funny but serio-reaction to a simple phone call ring and the resulting odd attempt at comic relief. It's almost as if the Spanish director forgot how to or couldn't replicate his use of comedy-drama that he managed in eighteen years earlier in The Girl of Your Dreams (1998) also about a movie production from Spain but this time they ended up shooting in Germany. Instead the ending seems to be a sort of clumsy old Wooden Allen mish-mash of cobbled together added final story plot along with a somewhat awkward, confusing but dramatic and touching flourish.

I don't think the ratings of this film is fair to the movie. I expected a bad bad movie, but that wasn't what I watched. I liked it! I was moved, it made me laugh and I think the way they incorporated the history of Spain was intelligent in the way they put a lot of references in the dialogue between the characters. Well done :)

I was looking forward to seeing The Queen of Spain. I loved the first film and this was very promising, with the same cast and most of the crew. Five minutes after it started, I just wanted to leave the theatre. The main problem is, I believe, the script, which is just very, very poor. The Girl of Your Dreams was pure bliss, and here they try to use the same structure and some of the gags are very similar, but it just does not work. The acting is also quite bad, which is surprising, for the actors are all very good. I did like the settings, even though they could have made more of them. They try to show the bleak Spain of the Franco regime, but this idea is not explored in depth. An unfortunate film.