Biutiful: Film and Character
The critically acclaimed film Biutiful was directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, an award winning Mexican director, producer, screenwriter, and composer. He was the first Mexican director to be nominated for both the Academy Award for Best Director, and the Directors Guild of America Award of Outstanding Directing for his film Babel. Two of his more recent films, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) and Revenant, were extremely well received and earned him a combined four Oscars. Due to his experience in every facet of filmmaking, Iñárritu is able to create an incredibly moving and cohesive final product. Through his focus on the angle and lighting of all shots and how they flow throughout the story to the background music and sounds that accompany his carefully crafted scenes, Iñárritu leaves no detail up to chance. He manages to create characters we can relate to and sympathize with even through their poor decisions. This ability was perfectly demonstrated with the main character of Biutiful, Uxbal. We follow him as he comes to grips with his terminal illness and begins to tie up loose ends in an attempt to ensure the future for his children. Uxbal has a special gift that alters the storyline greatly—he can see and communicate with the souls of those who have died but not crossed over. This adds an unexpected layer to a movie already somewhat focused on death, as it seems to present death as a crucial component of everyday life.
Biutiful follows Uxbal as he gets involved as a middle man for Barcelona’s underground industry of selling fake luxury items. These items are produced by undocumented Chinese workers and are sold on the city streets to tourists. Uxbal’s life is in shambles, he became involved in the illegal industry in an effort to provide for his two children before he dies because he fears that his wife, a bipolar drug addict, will be unable to properly care for them. Throughout all of this he employees his gift of communicating with those who have passed, to aid them in completing their unfinished business so they can cross over. He begins to oversee the treatment and living conditions for the Chinese factory workers employed by the operation. They are forced to live in a cold, crowded basement with few items beyond basic necessities covered. In an attempt to help them, Uxbal buys gas heaters. However, he cuts corners in the process and buys inexpensive units that ultimately kill all of the workers. We watch as Uxbal struggles with the knowledge that he caused so many deaths of innocent people who just wanted to make a better life for themselves and their families. The factory owners put the bodies in the ocean in an attempt to shift the blame from them. There is a haunting scene in which the ocean is filled with the floating bodies and we see Barcelonan monuments in the background (González Iñárritu 2011: 1:51:00-1:51:54). It seems to argue that, in every beautiful thing or place, something ugly lurks just below the surface. This is a common theme throughout the film, as it seems to present Barcelona in a very different way from other cinematic pieces. It shows the underbelly of the city many idealize, how the poverty, illness, and death that consume many of the residents are shrouded in an effort to present an appealing tourist destination.
As the film wraps up the audience has a difficult time feeling anything but sympathy for the man who has committed many deplorable acts in his final days. Watching him go through such human situations and responding in the way he felt was best suited for himself and his children served to make him an incredibly easy character to empathize with. Uxbal acted in an extreme manner because he was in an extreme circumstance: his illness was slowly killing him and he was desperately attempting to guarantee his children’s future without him in it. Humans by nature are not perfect, and are certainly going to make mistakes. Uxbal made many more mistakes in a shorter period of time than many do because he was essentially trying to fit a full life in a fraction of the time.
This film encompasses the daily struggles of individuals in poverty throughout the world, it highlights the inequality and issues in society while also giving a nod towards the things in life that sometimes make us forget just how bad it can get. We are able to identify with Uxbal because we all see the wrongs in our world but often engage in acts we do not agree with or look the other way when others act in immoral ways because they are necessary to our or our family’s well-being. According to Mariá del Mar Azcona’s article “‘We are all Uxbal’: Narrative Complexity in the Urban Borderlands in ‘Biutiful’,” when asked about the film Iñárritu would use the line “Todos somos Uxbal’ (we are all Uxbal)” in an effort to claim that we are “all part, not just innocent victims but knowing participants, of a system that is eating us up” (Del Mar Azcona 2015: 11). She goes on to argue that Uxbal’s illness is a metaphor for the corruption of the system, and how it is slowly killing us. We are able to watch this slow separation of soul from body throughout the film as small details are altered, such as shadows not corresponding with actions, or Uxbal’s reflection not matching his movements. This created a powerful and underlying message, that these conditions will hurt us in negligible ways at first ultimately working up to lead to our downfall.