Javier Bardem denies suffering a boycott: “They call me more and more to work”

Special envoy to the Cannes Film FestivalWith the permission of Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish director most loved in France in recent times is surely Rodrigo Sorogoyen (Madrid, 1981), who just a few days ago received the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government and has triumphed in French cinemas with titles such as El reino or As bestas. The culmination of his love story with France is the participation in the Cannes competition of his new film, El ser querido, which premieres this Saturday both at the festival and in French cinemas, an unusual fact for a Spanish production that will not reach our country until August.

In the film, an acclaimed Spanish director with two Oscars and based in Hollywood (Javier Bardem) returns after many years to shoot a film and meets his actress daughter (Victoria Luengo), whom he has not seen for years and wants to offer her one of the leading roles. El ser querido opens, in fact, with this father-daughter reunion, an immersive twenty-minute scene of high emotional voltage that sparks guilt, rage, and pride, open wounds of an absolutely dysfunctional relationship.

“We wanted to put all our cards on the table from the very first moment”, explains Sorogoyen: “The characters haven’t seen each other for thirteen years. There is brutal tension, but also love and a longing for the other”. The two actors, points out the director, improvised the dynamic of the scene at the moment of filming it. “I worked with them separately so that they would see each other for the first time on set while filming that scene –reveals Sorogoyen–. It was an hour-and-a-half scene without cuts, so they were more nervous than the characters”.

With Sorogoyen’s cameras and crew hidden and filming from afar, the two actors performed the scene without any technical direction in a real restaurant with extras playing customers. “Javier and I had the miraculous opportunity to look each other in the eye and feel that we were alone, but when Rodrigo cut the scene, the walls began to move and a hundred people came out from behind,” explains Luengo (Palma, 1990). “It was beautiful, and I feel very fortunate to have experienced it”.

Cinema within cinema

The reunion is the gateway to a gripping family drama with a couple of memorable scenes and a powerful interpretive duel between Bardem and Luengo. It is also a brilliant exercise of cinema within cinema that captures with realism the rhythms and sensations of a shoot, that of the film that the characters of Bardem and Luengo are filming in fiction, with relaxed moments, but also uncomfortable situations and a tension between father and daughter that ends up transferring to the professional relationship. "To make a film like El reino, which deals with political corruption, you have to investigate a lot, but to write about a shoot, we only needed to recall," explains Isabel Peña (Zaragoza, 1983), Sorogoyen's usual co-screenwriter.

Bardem (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1969) also had to recall, remembering having experienced "abuses of power" on some shoots, especially one in the nineties. When some characters of El ser querido confront the abusive gestures of the director played by Bardem, someone says that "things have changed," and Bardem agrees. "I have changed too – he assures –. A shoot is a not very democratic society, more like a dictatorship: one person gives orders and the others follow them, and that is fertile ground for abuse. Fortunately, we are now aware of it, but there is still a lot to be done and we must support those who report it." For Bardem, the change is happening fundamentally thanks to women. "Many men still find it difficult to set limits for other men, they consider it a betrayal of masculine values or a symptom of weakness," he adds.

The film alternates between the father's and the daughter's points of view, trapped in a labyrinth of love, guilt, and abandonment that seems to have no way out, especially due to the pride of the director played by Bardem, who finds it very difficult to accept past mistakes. “Esteban is a man of his time, which is mine, the sixties, and he is a man educated in outdated values about what it means to be a man –says Bardem–. He doesn't have the capacity to apologize. Many men find it difficult to apologize and admit they are wrong, to listen to the other person and let them in. And this has to do with a type of masculinity that we have to confront.” In fact, the actor admits that his “problem” with the character is that he found it hard to understand why he hadn't resolved his problems yet. “Why hasn't he gone to therapy and talked to someone? What makes this man not face the world in a more open, honest, and healthy way? It's his upbringing.”

A deep wound

For Luengo, on the other hand, her character is defined by a “very deep wound of abandonment” that generates complex and contradictory feelings in her. “She is not only angry with her father, she also idealizes him and is in love with him, she hates him and detests him, all at the same time –says the actress–. Even if you are forty years old, if your father or mother were not there, you still wish they would appear or understand why they weren't there.” Luengo states that the theme “personally resonates with me very closely”. In fact, the seed of the film was a conversation between Luengo, Sorogoyen, and Peña about the “especial” relationships each of them had with their father.

The actress tries not to think too much about the achievement of participating in two films in the Cannes competition (she also appears in Amarga Navidad), although sometimes she can't help but get emotional when she remembers the path traveled in recent years. “But I try not to dwell too much on that feeling, because it's not good –she assures–. In the end, it's a stroke of luck to be here, to feel so proud of the films I'm presenting and to be surrounded by people I admire. And every night, when I go to sleep, I think: ‘Thank you’. And I think I will cry a lot tonight at the premiere of the film, but I'm afraid, because it's not good to give yourself importance, it's not an actress's job to be very self-aware.”

Bardem, an old hand, manages the attention he receives as an international film figure more relaxedly, but without failing to use his influence to support causes such as Western Sahara, which is the theme of the film being shot within El ser querido at the actor's suggestion, who defends the choice with good arguments: “If the film talks about abandonment, it made sense to introduce the theme of the people of Sahara, whom Spain abandoned. And it is a very forgotten conflict that must continue to be denounced, a small Palestine”.

The Palestinian cause is another of Bardem's crusades, one of the few Hollywood actors who has openly denounced the genocide in Gaza, as Paul Laverty, a screenwriter and one of the jury members of the official competition in Cannes, recalled and celebrated a few days ago, criticizing the American industry's boycott of actors like Bardem or Susan Sarandon. “I sent him a message of thanks through a journalist friend, because I don't have his mobile number and because I am forbidden direct contact with the jury – Bardem explains –. But regarding the blacklist or the boycott, I have to say that nothing specific has happened to me that I can report. In fact, I'm having the opposite sensation: they are calling me more and more to work, even from the United States. And more and more people are supporting me, perhaps not publicly, but privately”. The actor associates the change in trend with the stance of the younger generations: “They are the ones who have said that genocide is inadmissible and must be denounced. Neutrality is not an option in the face of such a massacre”.