From Killer To Latin Lover

7 December 2008

Is Spanish star Javier Bardem acting when he plays a stud opposite Scarlett Johansson, asks ROBERT W. BUTLER.

Javier Bardem remembers when he realised he was a performer. "I was playing make-believe like any other kid," the 39-year-old actor recalls in a phone conversation from his Madrid home. "And there was a moment when something clicked inside that made me aware of myself, that allowed me to watch myself playing from the outside.

"Up to then, play had been unconscious. The difference between an actor and anyone else is that awareness of the playing."

He has been playing ever since, immersing himself in roles so disparate that a casual observer might not realise they're by the same man. "One of the great pleasures of my work is to impersonate others, to hide myself behind those guys," Bardem says. "To fill myself with someone else."

Bardem is pretty good at that - he has the Oscar to prove it. A favourite of the arthouse crowd for his work in films such as Before Night Falls and The Sea Inside, Bardem roared into the mainstream last year with the Coen brothers' hit No Country For Old Men. As eerie killer Anton Chigurh he mesmerised audiences and walked off with the statuette for best supporting actor.

He has portrayed murderers, a paraplegic, a gay Cuban poet, a crazed monk, a burly out-of-work shipbuilder ... and in many of his performances he has transformed himself physically, gaining or losing weight, shaving his head, growing a beard.

In Woody Allen's latest comedy, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which opens on December 26, Bardem finally plays the role you'd think would be most obvious for him - Juan Antonio, a Latin lover and sensuous painter who flits between three women: two Americans visiting Barcelona (Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall) and his mercurial ex-wife (Penelope Cruz).

"It's one of his more subtle roles," Boston Globe critic Ty Burr says of Bardem. "He's playing an almost generic European stud but because it's Bardem, he's doing it with a lot more shadings than we've seen before."

With his bedroom eyes and broken nose (the result, Bardem says, of a bar-room sucker punch a decade ago), he would seem a natural to portray sensual men. His first big success was as a stud in the 1992 Spanish film Jamon, Jamon. After the film became an international hit, those types of roles were the only ones offered him but Bardem held out for meatier character roles that would challenge him and his audience.

So why play the Latin lover now? "Well, it's Woody Allen," he says and describes the Allen set as one of the most efficient he has encountered.

"On Woody's set there is no time to waste. For actors who have been in American films, where there is a lot of downtime, it's a challenge to be alert, to do the work without the luxury of too much thinking. That might make some actors nervous, but Woody gives you extremely well-constructed dialogue to work with.

"You don't have to rewrite it to fit your conception of the character, which is often the case. And feeling safe with the words gives you extra time just to concentrate on the performance."

Playing a painter wasn't difficult. At one time Bardem hoped for a career as an artist. "What's different is that Juan Antonio is an abstract artist who pours and throws paint. My own art is much more realistic. But I must say that after doing the movie I've gone back and picked up my brush again."

One of the main characters in Vicky Cristina Barcelona is Barcelona itself. Bardem says Allen zeroed in on some of the cliches associated with the city - "flamenco music, wine, sunshine" - and deconstructed them.

"Woody makes us go through the stereotypes to see the people behind those stereotypes. No matter how exotic the setting may seem, we're really all the same - same issues, soul and common sense. Everyone is struggling."

One of the central struggles in the film is between Antonio and his ex-wife, Maria Elena (Cruz). A manic depressive who once stabbed Antonio in a fit of rage, Maria Elena is also a painter. After an absence of several years, she washes up at his apartment, homeless, penniless and on the verge of a breakdown. Despite the other women in his life, Antonio takes her in, feeling responsible to the woman he still loves while realising they can never again be romantically linked. It's a relationship that is equal parts humour and tragedy, with Cruz giving what may be her finest performance.

"Woody really paid attention to those scenes," Bardem says. "He wanted us to experiment, to push as hard as we could into extreme behaviour and then, if he thought it was necessary, to bring it down a bit. He wanted those two characters to represent the instability in relationships."

Apparently something else happened during the filming.

Bardem and Cruz had been friends ever since they co-starred in Jamon, Jamon. But on Allen's set, that friendship turned to love. At least, that is the story being told by the Spanish media. A source even quoted Bardem saying he was going to propose to Cruz.

Bardem isn't commenting. Before this interview a publicist for the distributor of the movie said Bardem wouldn't answer questions about his personal life.

It would have been odd if Bardem hadn't become an actor. He was born in the Canary Islands to a family of actors that has been active in the Spanish film industry almost from its inception. His mother, Pilar Bardem, has appeared in more than 100 films in more than 40 years, and his siblings, Carlos and Monica, are actors as well.

That acting is the family business may explain Bardem's matter-of-fact approach to his profession. The biggest fallout after winning the Oscar, he says, was not in how he viewed himself but in how he was viewed by others.

"I try not to let it affect me. But you discover that some people around you have changed. Some people place too much importance on it.

"Five months later things are back to normal. But the first two months were crazy and not always crazy good.

"The thing is, you have to let it go. Sure, you celebrate, enjoy the celebrity, drink a bit - but then let it go. It's not real. The real thing is to get a job and do the best you can.

"The real thing is to go to the market, buy a fish and have dinner with your friends."


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