The 80-year-old owner of a pharmaceutical empire, Humberto Suarez (José Luis Gómez), does not want to be remembered as just another bigwig: his dream is to leave his mark on the arts. Of all the arts, he chooses the most important, deciding to finance the film adaptation of the novel by a Nobel Prize winner. For this, they hire fashionable director Lola Cuevas (Penelope Cruz) and two top Spanish actors – local intellectual Ivan Torres (Oscar Martinez) and international star Felix Rivero (Antonio Banderas). They are expected to make a masterpiece, but already at the rehearsal stage it becomes clear that things will not go according to plan with this trio.
The famous Argentine directors Mariano Con and Gaston Dupra have been mocking the world of contemporary art (whether painting, as in “The Artist” and “Masterpiece”, or literature, as in “Honorary Citizen”) for almost their entire career, but this time they decided, to put it in Charms terms, to shatter the world of art-house festival cinematography. The Main Role’s characters are caricatured images of filmmakers whose narcissism and conviction that they are doing something important “for eternity” cannot help but look comical.
Also, The Leading Role is one of the best (and funniest) films of the “movies about movies” sub-genre. There is something Bunuelian about the absurd situations that Lola – with her unorthodox methods of working with actors – plays out with Ivan and Felix. Moreover, in this arrangement is viewed and a kind of gender revenge. Everyone has heard of oppressive perfectionist directors (from Kubrick to von Trier) whose victims were actresses (Shelley Duvall and Bjork in these examples, respectively), but here an eccentric director with a reputation as an art-house prodigy is inspired to make fun of two honored male artists. (Take the scene where Lola makes Torres and Rivero act out a scene while sitting under a… five-ton rock hanging over their heads!)
Finally, Inside the Leading Role is a kind of magnum opus for Cohn and Dupraz, for the first time Argentinians have had a major star (Cruz and Banderas), while the story itself mirrors the previous, smaller-scale, budgeted productions of the directorial tandem. Thus, the story of two twin brothers (one with a beard, the other without) who fall in love with the same woman is carried here (along with actor Oscar Martinez) from “Honorary Citizen” (2016), and the episode with listening to avant-garde music, whose noisy elements are woven in from the renovation apartment next door, is neatly borrowed from “Neighbor” (2009).
Perhaps, for a satirical comedy “starring role” is not the most cheerful and dynamic movie, but the usual for Dupras and Cohn pacing allows you to fully appreciate the director’s findings and the work of the actors. After all, the Argentines’ new film is not so much a mockery of the directors’ wackiness as a touching declaration of love for the actors, both in terms of their talent and their ironic smiling egocentricity.