There’s a kind of excitable silliness in this disposable, film-within-a-film comedy from Fernando Trueba, starring Penélope Cruz – to whom Trueba gave her big break in his 1992 film Belle Epoque. In fact, it’s maybe the nearest thing that this year’s Berlin film festival has to a Carry On. There are one or two groans and finger-drumming moments of impatience, due to its sentimentality, perverse nostalgia and knowingly retro sexual politics. But it also has a kind of puppyish excitability, one or two laughs, and a lovely song, when Cruz sings Granada on a movie set. In fact, Cruz saves the film. The cinephilia and movie-studio fetishism are picturesque, though Almodóvar has given us the same thing with more intensity and feeling.
The setting is the 1950s, which is introduced by an extended archive-reel montage over the opening credits, patched in with the spoof “real” figures of this film. Cruz plays Macarena Granada, a gorgeously beautiful and much-married Spanish movie star who has had a tremendous Loren-ish career in Hollywood and now returns to Franco’s Spain to star in an American co-production into which the Spanish state has poured funds, due to its ringingly patriotic subject matter: it is the story of Queen Isabella of Castile. But from the start the production has problems: Macarena has the hots for a cute guy on the crew, necessitating farcical trips with him back to her dressing room, and the director, a John Ford-ish guy with an eyepatch, keeps falling asleep. Director JA Bayona has a cameo as a projectionist, and Arturo Ripstein has something similar in his role as big-shot Hollywood producer Sam Spiegelman (a pretty perfunctory renaming of Sam Spiegel). Javier Cámara is an assistant director, Mandy Patinkin is a left-ish US screenwriter and McCarthy exile, who confesses that the original script, about Columbus and America, had to be hastily and incoherently rewritten because it wasn’t sufficiently reactionary for Franco.
Antonio Resines plays Blas Fontineros, a once-renowned film director, now an unperson in Spain due to his leftwing views, having been on the losing side in the civil war, and imprisoned in a concentration camp during the second world war, leading to rumours that he was dead. He is now serving out a day-release jail term, doing manual work on the state-sponsored film set. His friends and admirers hatch a bizarre plan to help him escape across the border to France. This they intend to do by dressing in full costume as 15th-century knights and “kidnapping” him, hoping that everyone will think it’s something to do with the movie: a weird new twist on Argo.
It is entirely preposterous – on the dividing line between entertaining and exasperating, and sometimes the wrong side of that line. The representation of swishy gay men is pretty gamey. But in the final analysis, Cruz carries the film. She has a ridiculous kind of heroism, and her disguises are hilarious, particularly as a knight, when she insists on wearing a false beard under her helmet.