Spell it the way it sounds

Biutiful 2011 Spain/Mexico (148 minutes), directed and cowritten by Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is a medium.

In business, he is a local facilitator between Chinese sweatshop owners who have illegal Chinese immigrants producing knock-off designer handbags, West Africans who sell the handbags and bootleg DVDs in Barcelona’s fancier districts (and also deal drugs on their own as a sideline), and a crooked cop paid to look the other way from these goings-on.

Uxbal also is a folk spiritual medium between people who have just died and their families, giving them assurance that their loved one has made his destination safely and without pain, for which he receives small cash gratuities.

Uxbal’s parents died when he was very young; he never met his father, who fled Franco’s Spain for Mexico before he was born and never returned. Marambra (Maricel Álvarez), Uxbal’s ex-wife, is a bipolar party girl, and Tito (Eduard Fernández), his unmarried older brother, is the owner of a strip club and interested primarily in sex, drugs and money in whichever order they turn up.

When Uxbal finds out that he has an advanced, terminal cancer, with only ‘a month or two’ to ‘maintain [his] quality of life’ with chemotherapy, he tries to become a sentimental medium between his parents and his two young children, Ana (Hanaa Bouchaib) and Mateo (Guillermo Estrella), over whom he has full custody.

Uxbal is not a good guy: he is a criminal engaged in a chain of consensual exploitation that greed and economic globalization provide, consensual because everyone involved seems to understand and generally to follow the ground rules. But rules are broken. A beautifully shot, kinetic, violent foot chase by a large number of policemen with truncheons converging on West African street hawkers through tourists in the heart of the city has the feel of a prizefight. And Uxbal’s good intentions to improve the life of Chinese workers go horribly awry.

But he is not a bad guy either: he is a caring and attentive father and seems genuinely to be interested in the welfare of others, among whom the troubled and irresponsible Marambra and the poor Chinese and Africans trying to make a living.

This being Iñárritu, two complex parallel stories with their own cast of characters which relate to Uxbal’s business activities are interwoven simultaneously with those of Uxbal’s personal life, his family and medical problems: the story of Hai (Taisheng Cheng), the Chinese sweatshop owner, a closeted gay family man, and Liwei (Luo Jin), his second-in-command and secret gay lover; and the story of Ige (Diaryatou Daff), wife of Ekwame (Cheikh Ndiaye), one of Uxbal’s street sellers, both from Senegal.

In the end, Iñárritu’s resolutions of these stories would speak for Uxbal’s righteous anger and his loyalty.

But as to whether Uxbal succeeds as the medium he wants to be between his parents and his children would come down to whether they follow the advice he gives his daughter when she asks him how to spell the English word ‘beautiful’ while doing her homework at the kitchen table: ‘Spell it just the way it sounds, my love.’