Review of Biutiful (2010) by Júlio A — 27 Oct 2016

You can't fault Javier Bardem's acting skill or indeed his tenacity as he takes us on a depressing and overly long tour of some of the least salubrious estates around Barcelona. It comes to something that the lighter moments are actually provided by his visits to hospital to check on the progress of his prostate cancer.

I can't help feeling that his quality of life would have been improved no end had he just spent a few minutes with a bottle of Harpic and a scouring pad and cleaned up his less than sanitary looking toilet.

This film is so grim and bleak as to make Mike Leigh look like an episode of The Simpsons and frankly, I found it tested my will power to sit through it. Bardem's character Uxbal faces hardship, bad luck and tragedy at every step as he struggles single handedly to raise two children.

They live in utter squalor and poverty with only a collection of crooks, drug addicts and shady characters for company. I'm all for a bleak movie now and again but this was just so grindingly downbeat that I really felt depressed by it.

Worse still, it is far, far too long and I'd easily got the measure of it, and largely lost interest at the halfway point still with well over an hour to go. If you are going to watch this, put all the sharp implements well out of reach.