Official Competition

The Argentine duo Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn made their name with The Distinguished Citizen (2016), the satire that won Oscar Martínez the Volpi Cup at Venice. Official Competition, written with Andrés Duprat, is their first Spanish production, made by Jaume Roures's Mediapro with RTVE, TV3 and Orange; shooting began in February 2020, was halted by the pandemic and wrapped that October. It premiered in competition at the 78th Venice International Film Festival in September 2021, played Toronto and won the audience award for the galas programme at Vancouver.

The premise is a gift: an octogenarian tycoon bankrolls a film of a Nobel-winning novel to burnish his name, hiring an eccentric auteur, Lola Cuevas, to direct two leads who could hardly be more different. Penélope Cruz plays Lola under a tempest of red curls, putting her actors through a series of increasingly bizarre rehearsal exercises; Antonio Banderas is the glib Hollywood star, Martínez the solemn stage actor devoted to the method. Remarkably, Cruz and Banderas had previously shared barely two minutes of screen time, in Almodóvar's I'm So Excited!. It was shot in Madrid, El Escorial and Ávila by Arnau Valls Colomer, whose cinematography earned a Goya nomination.

Critics were delighted: 96% on Rotten Tomatoes from more than 150 reviews and 79 on Metacritic, with the consensus noting that its tight focus and sharp humour travel well beyond hardcore cinephiles. It went on to win Best Comedy Film at the Feroz Awards and Best Ibero-American Comedy at the Platinos. It is a precise and merciless comedy about vanity, the method and the business of prestige.