In
Goya in Bordeaux, filmviewers are treated to
an artistic vision of the Spanish genius, democrat, and libertine
who was Goya. The film (in Spanish, Goya en Burdeos) begins
in the final year of his life, 1828, at the age of eighty-two,
when we immediately know that Goya (played by Francisco Rabal)
is near death. He reminisces about his life to his youngest
daughter (played by Daphne Fernandez) while in exile from
Spain in Bordeaux, and we learn the sources of inspiration
for his immortal legacy. A turning point in his life, portrayed
in the film (José Coronado plays the younger Goya), came when
he marveled at a painting by seventeenth century painter Diego
Velásquez, who anticipated impressionism by leaving paintings
unfinished so that the eye could supply a third dimension.
An even more critical influence on Goya came in 1791, while
forty-five, when he nearly died from a malady that left him
deaf, and we see in the film that he attributed much of the
passion on his canvasses to an ability to listen to an internal
ear, inspiring him to depict raw emotion as never before in
the history of art. We also learn that artists, to survive
in the royal courts, not only had to have talent but also
had to play politics. Goya’s many portraits were thus part
of the politicking but only interesting to Goya if he could
have sex with the most beautiful of his subjects, and much
of the film focuses on his affair with Cayetana, the Dutchess
of Alba (played by Maribel Verdú), whose portrait he painted
in 1795. Goya’s political beliefs, however, were inspired
by the Enlightenment. He believed that Spain’s decline as
a world power was due to the monarchy’s refusal to provide
education for the masses while retaining the Inquisition to
suppress dissent. When Napoleon conquered Spain, placing his
brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne in 1808, Goya depicts
the atrocities in a gripping mural, "The Disasters of the
war, 1810-14," which comes alive on the screen. When the French
are expelled by 1813, a constitutional regime is proclaimed,
but in 1814 Ferdinand VII is restored to the throne, so Goya
goes into exile in Bordeaux along with some of his fellow
liberals to escape the Inquisition, and the dark masterpieces
featuring repression, which emerged in the last years of his
life while in Bordeaux, are displayed in the film. Carlos
Saura, the director, has provided a surreal biography, not
quite in chronological order, which shows how Goya indicted
autocracy on canvass. According to André Malraux, titles at
the end inform us, modern art began with Francisco de Goya.
MH
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