Tag Archives: Penélope Cruz

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 410 – Ferrari

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Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz star as lovers, business partners, and rivals, in a motorsport biopic that’s much more about the drama off the track than on it. In 1939, Italian racing driver, team owner, and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari founded the car manufacturer that would become one of the best-known and most prestigious marques in history; Ferrari the film tells the story of events in 1957, with the company in financial difficulties and his wife, Laura, distanced from him as they grieve the recent loss of their son, Dino. She tolerates Enzo’s dalliances with mistresses, as long as he’s home before the maid arrives – but his second family is secret from her.

Mike sees an opportunity to right his wrongs from our podcast on Ford vs Ferrari, aka Le Mans ’66, in which, he declares, he overfocused on insignificant details, while José rightly and happily enjoyed the big personalities, charming and interesting central friendship, and entertaining, dramatic races… by suggesting they’ve switched seats. José finds the cultural specificity of the time and place in which Ferrari‘s set lacking, criticising missed or misunderstood nuances, and is let down by Driver’s blankness in key scenes opposite Cruz, whose brilliant performance subtly conveys Laura’s richly complex competing feelings. Details schmetails, counters Mike: here we have a big brooding drama about deep interpersonal clashes, grief, loss, power struggles and ambition, centred around an actor with fake grey hair and a faker Italian accent – what’s not to love?

As with Ford v Ferrari, we both enjoyed Ferrari. It’s just that one of us did so with a big, beaming, untroubled smile, and the other with a raised eyebrow that said “hmm”.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 339 – Parallel Mothers

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

José gives Mike a history lesson on the Spanish Civil War, the scars it left on Spanish culture and society, and filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s own relationship to it and the dictatorship to which it led, under which he grew up and which fell in the few years prior to his ascent to prominence. His new film, Parallel Mothers, inspires this review of the past, embroiled as it is in confronting Spain’s modern history and, José argues, adapting elements of it to the melodrama of motherhood that forms its primary plot – a plot which is used to explore questions of lies, psychic violence, and instrumentality that are part of the film’s critique of Spain’s Pact of Forgetting, its political and cultural agreement to avoid confronting the legacy of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, which the itch to scratch historical memory is seen to disturb.

It’s a film with serious flaws, and a disappointment given Almodóvar’s estimable body of work, especially the masterpiece that was his most recent film, Pain and Glory, but a film that creates this kind of discourse is to be valued. It’s pat, one-dimensional, and with a leadenness of tone that isn’t typical of Almodóvar, whose sense of humour is usually so reliable – but still worth seeing.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.