{"id":587806,"date":"2026-05-16T19:47:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T19:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/587806\/"},"modified":"2026-05-16T19:47:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T19:47:08","slug":"the-beloved-review-bardem-is-powerful-in-a-making-of-a-movie-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/587806\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Beloved’ Review: Bardem Is Powerful in a Making-of-a-Movie Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tRodrigo Sorogoyen\u2019s \u201cThe Beloved<\/a>\u201d is the story of a famous film director, Esteban Mart\u00ednez (Javier Bardem<\/a>), who returns to his native Spain to shoot a movie in the desert and hires his estranged actress daughter, Emilia (Victoria Luengo), to play one of the leads. He claims that she\u2019s the best one for the role, but we assume he\u2019s doing it to mend fences (he is). That makes the movie sound a lot like \u201cSentimental Value,\u201d in which Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd and Renate Reinsve played similar roles. The two films overlap in numerous ways. But \u201cThe Beloved,\u201d unlike \u201cSentimental Value,\u201d really is one of those movies about the making of a movie, like \u201cDay for Night\u201d or \u201cThe Stunt Man.\u201d It\u2019s a meaty and enjoyable entry in the genre, one that updates it to the present day, when it\u2019s not as easy as it once was for a director to bully a cast and crew (and Esteban, make no mistake, is something of a bully).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the opening scene, Esteban and Emilia meet for lunch at a restaurant in Madrid to discuss the possibility of her doing the film. He\u2019s all feints and jabs and courtly charm, befitting his status as a celebrity director who won an Oscar for best international film. By contrast, Emilia, in her mid-thirties, has a face that lights up with sunny enthusiasm and, just as quickly, turns downcast. The Spanish actress Victoria Luengo exudes a fascinating quality of pensive engagement \u2014 she suggests a more anxious version of Brooke Adams.<\/p>\n

\n\tEmilia\u2019s tentativeness around her father is a red flag, and so is the fact that the two haven\u2019t seen each other for 13 years. (A different kind of red flag is the fact that she\u2019s guzzling red wine and beer at lunch.) The explanation for their separation begins to come to the fore when Esteban recalls how much he used to like taking Emilia to the movies when she was 12 and 13. But she remembers it differently, referencing the time they went to see \u201cKill Bill: Volume 2\u201d and Esteban was drunk and high and got into a fistfight. This doesn\u2019t square at all with his memory, and that\u2019s the conflict that underlies \u201cThe Beloved\u201d: her long-simmering pain vs. his denial of ever having caused it. The theme is a conduit for a larger meditation, one that runs throughout the film, on the narcissism of male anger.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s been a while since Bardem had a role this straight-up that he could sink his choppers into. He is always a formidable presence, but since Esteban is himself a force \u2014 charismatic and manipulative, ruthless but cunningly quiet about it \u2014 for a while we just feel like we\u2019re watching Javier Bardem in all his handsome, magnetic and unmistakable aggro Javier glory. The subtle power of his performance, and it\u2019s a terrific one, is that it takes us a while to grasp the kind of mind games Esteban is a master of. For years, he was known as an enfant terrible; now he\u2019s matured. (He drinks mineral water.) The movie he\u2019s shooting is a high-minded period piece called \u201cDesert,\u201d set in the Western Sahara, about the Sahrawi uprising against Spanish colonialism, and part of what\u2019s deadpan funny about \u201cThe Beloved\u201d is that we have almost no idea what\u2019s going on in any given scene of the movie-within-the-movie; it might be a piece of middlebrow junk. (That was true of the film being shot in \u201cDay for Night.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\n\tRodrigo Sorogoyen fixates on the process of filmmaking, the on-set politics and clashes of personality. He has made \u201cThe Beloved\u201d in a playful and, at moments, prankishly cerebral way, cutting in black-and-white sequences (part of the point is getting us to solve the riddle of what they\u2019re doing there) and staging the filmmaking in a deliberately disorienting way, all to put us in the shoes of Emilia, who\u2019s fairly discombobulated by the whole process. He also fills in Esteban and Emilia\u2019s history with an arresting slice of invented cinephilia: We know that Emilia\u2019s mother was an actress named Charo Vera (N\u00faria Prims), and we see clips of the movie he made with her back in the \u201990s \u2014\u00a0it was his first film, called \u201cSorocco,\u201d which many still think is his best, and it featured a much-talked-about existential three-way bedroom scene. But after the success of that film, Esteban walked away from his family. He now has a new, younger, second family.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn glimpses, we get to know the actors in \u201cDesert,\u201d the trouble-shooting assistant director (Marina Fo\u00efs), the cinematographer (Pepa Gracia) who winds up quitting with three weeks to go. And Sorogoyen uses the shooting of an outdoor country lunch-table scene that becomes a chain of mishaps to stage the most bravura sequence of \u201cThe Beloved\u201d \u2014 a hilariously anguished vision of what it looks like when the process of filmmaking breaks down. The actors start to fall into giggle fits, which infuriates Esteban, but what incenses him most is that they aren\u2019t consuming the fish stew in front of them with the proper on-camera gusto (in part because it\u2019s 9:00 a.m.). He turns his \u201cdirection\u201d of their actorly eating into a battle of wills spiced with a pinch of sadism. He\u2019s throwing no more of an on-set tantrum than so many directors have, but as one of his assistants points out, you can\u2019t quite get away with that anymore.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat \u201cThe Beloved\u201d is saying, analogously, is that what you really can\u2019t get away with anymore is abandoning your family and convincing yourself it\u2019s okay. Luengo\u2019s performance becomes more touching as Emilia\u2019s fury rises to the surface. And while Bardem plays Esteban as a righteous control freak, we can see, by the end, that what he\u2019s trying to keep a lid on is his buried regret over his own actions. For nearly the entire film, he won\u2019t admit that to himself. But what Bardem\u2019s masterful acting shows you is that underneath it all, he knows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rodrigo Sorogoyen\u2019s \u201cThe Beloved\u201d is the story of a famous film director, Esteban Mart\u00ednez (Javier Bardem), who returns…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":587807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[41891,96,25632,2839,200909,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-587806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-javier-bardem","tag-movies","tag-the-beloved","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/587807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}