Biutiful

Often, writes Richard Blakely on the Damaris Culturewatch website,  we only recognise what’s really important in life when we are forced to come face to face with our own mortality. The prospect of our deaths helps us to put things into perspective.

He is reviewing Biutiful which manages to take a heady mix of illegal immigration, fake products, money, sex, drugs, bipolar disorder, death and seances to raise some important questions for its viewers.

Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is a conflicted resident of the Santa Coloma district of Barcelona, an area packed full of immigrants, both legal and illegal. Uxbal is involved in a number of illicit occupations. In the first, he and two Chinese men, Hai (Taisheng Chen) and Liwei (Luo Jin), employ immigrants to create imitation products. Uxbal then has his team of men, led by a Senegalese immigrant named Ekweme (Cheikh Ndiaye), sell the fake products, although lately the team has also taken to peddling illegal drugs, despite Uxbal’s misgivings. Uxbal and his brother Tito (Eduard Fernández) also work with Hai and Liwei to provide cheap immigrant labour to work on building sites and anywhere else they might be needed. His other profession, which he does alone, is to communicate with the dead on behalf of grieving families, receiving any messages they might want to pass on to their living relatives. He remains aloof from the grief of the mourners, maintaining the role of messenger in exchange for his fee. [more…]

Richard Blakely