Goya in Bordeaux

There's something about the movie screen that doesn't like painters. Adding to the ranks of fulsome bio-pics of great masters is Carlos Saura's Goya in Bordeaux, a turgid and pretentious farrago that makes the prospect of watching paint dry seem downright appealing. Francisco Rabal plays the ursine, octogenarian painter, who's in exile from Spain in Bordeaux with fellow liberals and drifting in and out of the past with his young daughter Rosalita (Dafne Fernández). He broods about his ambitions as Spain's court artist, his crushed dreams of bringing French democratic principles to his homeland, and he returns obsessively to the love of his life, the Duchess of Alba (Maribel Verdú). Saura employs transparently artificial sets and tableaux vivants of Goya's masterworks in an attempt to re-create the dying man's stream of consciousness; it goes over like the last segment of 2001 as done for dinner theater. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's visual genius is not to be denied, however; his rendition of Goya's Disasters of War will have you checking out the originals. Screens tonight at 6:45 and 9:10 p.m. and tomorrow at noon and 2:20 and 4:40 p.m.

-- Peter Keough

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Film Festival Feature Films

Shadow of the Vampire | Songcatcher | Venus Beauty Institute | What's Cooking? | The Broken Hearts Club | Envy | Goya in Bordeaux | Human Resources | Skipped Parts | Amargosa | Henry Hill | Relative Values | The Rising Place | The Contender | Pitch People | Roof to Roof | Four Dogs Playing Poker | Reckless Indifference | Requiem for a Dream | Shadow Magic | About Adam | Charming Billy | Enemies of Laughter | Into the Arms of Strangers | Running on the Sun | A Trial in Prague | Harry, He's Here to Help | A Man is Mostly Water | Seven Girlfriends

Also, Boston Film Festival short films