VIEW FILM STILLS: Goya's Ghosts

READ MORE: Goya's Ghosts interview: Milos Forman and Javier Bardem

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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 7/19/07)

Because so many of his pictures are lavishly turned-out period pieces, and because his rate of output is so infrequent, it may seem a stretch to characterize Milos Forman's cinema as one of rebellion. But just look at the work, particularly the work that came after the Czech-born Forman, one of the leading lights of the '60s Czechoslovakian "New Wave," came to America: The protagonists of 1971's Taking Off rebel against the tyrannies of parenthood after their daughter runs away. Then there's the irrepressible McMurphy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; the free-loving, draft-loathing hippies of Hair; Coalhouse Walker Jr. of Ragtime, who becomes an agitator purely by accident, the accident being that he's black; and the indolent, convention-flouting Mozart of Amadeus. Valmont is so titled not just because there was another film adaptation of Les Liasons Dangereuses out at the same time using an English version of that original title; it was also because Forman placed his film's emphasis on that character's disdain for bourgeois hypocrisy. Larry Flynt and Andy Kaufman, real-life subjects of Forman's two subsequent films, need no explanation here.

A consideration of these characters shows that Forman's not just interested in rebellion per se; rather, he's determined to delve into the sometimes discomforting fact that rebellions, even necessary ones, don't often have a pretty face. McMurphy's a seedy statutory rapist, Mozart a boor, Valmont a libertine, Flynt a bit of a yahoo, and so on. In his new picture, Goya's Ghosts, which reunites him with sometime writing collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière (who last worked with Forman on Valmont in 1989), Forman introduces us to perhaps the ugliest rebel in his oeuvre.

No, it's not the titular 19th–century Spanish painter Goya, played here by Skarsgård. It's a monk named Lorenzo (Bardem), who we first see defending Goya's etchings of depraved and deprived scenes. His fellow priests want Goya — who at the time is also the painter to the court — brought up on charges, but Lorenzo says, no, the artist is only depicting the reality of what's around him. What needs to change is the reality, and the church can change that reality by revving the Inquisition into high gear once more. Lorenzo's plan receives a thumbs-up from the Grand Inquisitor (Lonsdale), and off Lorenzo and his minions go. One of the innocents they catch in their web is an angel-faced model of Goya's, Ines, who is accused of practicing "Judaicism" after she's witnessed declining a pork dish at a restaurant. She is imprisoned and tortured.