Official Competition: Cruz and Banderas have a ball dismantling their own craft

On the occasion of his birthday, ageing pharmaceutical billionaire Humberto Suárez (José Luis Gómez) ponders his legacy with his assistant, Matías (Manolo Solo). Should he ensure the continuation of his name with a charitable foundation? Or a bridge? Or as the producer of a movie? Not just any movie but the best movie that money can buy. Matías is duly dispatched to buy the rights of a critically acclaimed novel and secure the services of eccentric film-making genius Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz, in fabulous form in a fabulousl red wig).

“I suffer a lot through my films,” explains Lola, a philosophy that she soon extends to her two main actors: slightly dim international heart-throb Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas) and theatre purist Iván Torres (Oscar Martínez).

The script — written by Argentinian directors Mariano Cohn and Andrés Duprat, and the latter’s brother Gastón Duprat — mercilessly skewers every outrageous story you’ve ever heard about obsessive film-makers or Stanislavski-driven performers. Every time the performers hint at vulnerability and complications, the screenplay pulls out the rug and reveals more self-regarding superficiality.

Lola, who similarly may be an absolute fraud, makes her leading men rehearse under a boulder hoisted by a crane and destroys their various career awards to ensure that they feel “real pressure”. (Watch out for the destruction of Martínez’s own Venice Volpi prize for Duprat and Cohn’s The Distinguished Citizen.) The competing vanities of the actors, meanwhile, add further strife. Iván simply can’t hide his distaste for the preening Félix, with his many cars, girls and Hollywood-villain roles; Félix, in turn, sarcastically calls him “maestro”.

Everyone on screen is having a ball — albeit behind the straightest of faces — in this uproarious gallimaufry of movie-related pretentiousness. The absurdity is exquisitely detailed and mounted. Carefully constructed jokes are amplified by cinematographer Arnau Valls Colomer’s pleasingly askew framing, Alain Bainée’s sleek production design, and Wanda Morales’ dramatic costumes. Cruz won at last year’s Venice Film Festival for her work on Parallel Mothers, which played alongside Official Competition in, well, another wink, official competition. But she’s never worn a blouse with more intent than she does here.