Goya's Ghosts

Starring: Natalie Portman, Javier Bardem

Release: 2006

From Andrei Rublev, audiences do not really get a coherent and accurate biography of the life of Russia"s most famous painter of icons, but, what they do get is a fairly honest sense of the nature and quality of life Medieval Russia and how that experience is reflected in orthodox art of the period. In Lust of Life, viewers of the film can glean a fairly accurate understanding of the circumstances surrounding and the overall arc of the life of Van Gogh, as long as they don"t get to hung up on the details.Goya"s Ghosts, meanwhile, deals with a plot and story that are complete contrivance -- a made up tale and a good a sordid story. Like the previous two films discussed in this list, the film assumes the premise that the artist, in this case Spain"s Francisco Goya, captures in his unique style the zeitgeist of his era.His surroundings and environment directly influence his work.Yet, Goya"s Ghosts is decidedly more concerned with the year it was released (2005) than it is with 1797, the year in which it is set.

The film is co-written and directed by Milos Foreman, the Czech-born director of the acclaimed film Amadeus. Francisco Goya was a Spanish court painter and printmaker of the French Revolutionary period. His work is noted for its darkness, both in subject matter and style, although he was also a well-renowned portrait painter. One of his most famous, and frightening works, Saturn Devouring His Son, is featured towards the end of the film, whose climax and resolution is almost as twisted and bleak as the painting itself. Also featured in the film are some of Goya"s naturalistic and honest portraits, as well as his paintings of atrocities committed by Napoleonic troops during their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula.

The plot of the film resembles a soap opera and is difficult to summarize with brevity. The daughter of a noble family, Inés (played by Natalie Portman), is arrested by the Spanish Inquisition on suspicion of being Jewish because she does not like the taste of pork.The man in charge of this criminal affair is a priest named Lorenzo, played by Javier Bardem. Inés is violently and severely tortured until she finally confesses to the crime of spreading the Jewish faith. She is detained in a dungeon indefinitely (do you see the modern parallels yet?). Inés"s story continues from there, full of executions, more torture, prostitution, and kidnappings. Goya"s role in this plot is extremely minimal; he in an employee of the court and a friend of Inés"s family, and he attempts vainly to use his influence to get the girl released. After watching even the first few scenes, it shouldn"t come as a spoiler to find that the movie ends on a down note – no one really grows, no one really changes. Like the horrifying tone set by Saturn Devouring His Son, the film leaves the viewer unsettled, uncomfortable, and unhopeful. If all this seems fatalistic it is because it is extremely fatalistic.Fatalism is a strong thread within Eastern European New Wave film, a filmmaking philosophical school of which Foreman was a key part.

The film"s parallels with the post-9-ll political/geopolitical environment are heavy-handed but are also occasionally surprising. Just when you are ready to scream, “I get it, Foreman! You see torture as not only being ethically objectionable by tactically useless, the Spanish Inquisition is a metaphor for the U.S. government, and its paranoia a metaphor for our own!" -- the film goes and switches its metaphor on us. France enters the film, gets rid of the Inquisition...and is just as bad as their predecessors. Viewers realize that the U.S. in not necessarily Spain, but maybe it"s France and the democratic Revolution. In this way, the film"s handling of the metaphor becomes slightly more sophisticated. The decision is between two bad fates: leave the Inquisition alone and let it run its own horrible course or spread your Revolution to those who don"t want it and resent it and will resist it violently.

So what does all of this story really have to do with Goya? His art is only loosely affiliated with the plot here, but his viewpoint was dark and political and nationalistic. Like in the two previous films, the artist is presented as lens through which to view the good and bad of society -- in this case, the very very bad.

Don't miss the other blog posts in my series on movies about artists!

10 Movies You Should See About Artists:

• #10 - Andrei Rublev
• #9 - Lust for Life
• #7 - Pollock
• #6 - Basquiat
• #5 - Girl with a Pearl Earring
• #4 - The Agony and the Ecstasy