This review was originally published in Cinema Scope.
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“What else dost thou want, Belmonte?”
When the question at the heart of Uruguayan director Federico Veiroj’s fourth feature, Belmonte, is finally spoken aloud, it comes in a whisper. Javier Belmonte (Gonzalo Delgado) has just woken with a start from a Buñuelian dream in which he sat at a piano with the beautiful young Monica (Giselle Motta), caressing her back and shoulders as she played a dirge-like theme and two of his former lovers looked on in judgment. When Belmonte settles back into bed, the camera follows his movement, revealing Monica sleeping there beside him. He stares at her with a pained expression, as if unsure whether this is also a dream. We can’t be sure either. The walls in the bedroom, as in the fantasy, are painted in rich primary colours, and the strain of the piano carries over into this new diegetic world. Monica lies still, with her eyes closed, and acknowledges him only with her occult whisper: “What else dost thou want, Belmonte?”
Belmonte is a familiar character, bordering on a cliché: the Middle-Aged Male Artist, divorced and horny, adrift in both his personal and professional life, with all of his many crises on full display. He is, quite literally, the subject of every conversation in the film—to the point that, in the few instances when characters are, presumably, discussing other topics, we aren’t allowed a vantage close enough to overhear their dialogue. All of Montevideo and the people who live there, from the strangers and musicians at the sea wall to a packed house at the Solis Theatre, act as a mirror for Belmonte, reflecting his everyday, all-consuming angst. “You’re not 20 anymore,” a curator at the National Museum tells him. “Don’t you want to fall in love again?” asks his brother. “I want to have a family,” says his ex-wife, pregnant with her new partner’s child. Even the critical essays written for his upcoming retrospective strike Belmonte as invasive and accusatory. “These texts intending to diagnose me,” Belmonte tells the designer of the show’s catalogue, “I want them far away from the images, far away from my work.”
Veiroj has said that Belmonte grew out of a desire to collaborate with Delgado, a painter and occasional actor and filmmaker who has worked as a production designer and art director on a number of notable South American productions, including Lisandro Alonso’s Fantasma (2006) and Liverpool (2008) and Veiroj’s previous features Acné (2008) and The Apostate (2015). He’s a natural onscreen presence, a more rugged Mark Duplass type, and Veiroj wisely puts him to work in familiar surroundings: Belmonte is, among other things, a portrait of an artist. While the film chases a number of tangents, including side plots involving the family fur business and his elderly father’s flirtations with a much younger man, Veiroj is keenly interested in the daily labour of artmaking. If the film is a “character study,” much of the character development emerges from Veiroj’s attention to Delgado’s practiced movements and behaviours. Throughout the film we see Belmonte lifting and carrying canvases, doodling in notepads, and negotiating sales. An early scene involves a perfectly juvenile sightgag in which Belmonte meets with a client. He stands straight-backed with both hands behind his back, and Veiroj frames him so that a large penis in the painting beside him stands in, visually, for his own. Delgado/Belmonte and Veiroj are the same age and at the same point in their careers, so if the punchline is that artists inevitably whore themselves to the financiers, then the joke is on all of them.
For Belmonte, the most painful rebukes come from his ten-year-old daughter, Celeste (Olivia Molinar Eijo), who, like every decent child of every decent parent, exists as a kind of moral exemplar against whom he must constantly judge himself. In an early scene, Belmonte picks her up from school and drives her to his studio. As they open the door, Veiroj cuts to a low-angle medium close-up of the girl and stays on her cherubic, gap-toothed face for 15 seconds as she takes in the spectacle of her father’s latest paintings, a series of larger-than-life nude men, all hunched and grotesque. Belmonte hides a particularly disturbing portrait that has captured her attention and then clears away a bit of mess to make room for her homework. Neither says very much. Celeste watches him, with fascination, as he staples fresh paper to a canvas. Belmonte watches her, equally fascinated, as she sketches a drawing.
Celeste’s visit to Belmonte’s studio is a fine scene in its own right. The back-and-forth shifts between the two characters’ points of view open up what had been, until then, a very limited and subjective perspective. (Much of the film operates formally like the dream of Monica, with Belmonte’s technicolour fantasy life bleeding, Kaurismaki-like, into the expressionist visual design of the film’s reality.) Indeed, Celeste is revealed in that moment to be the true love interest in what is suddenly a much more interesting story. But the studio visit also sets up an important scene later in the film, when Celeste prods her father to explain his work, asking him pointedly if one of his subjects has covered his face in his hands because he’s afraid. “No,” Belmonte confesses, “he’s embarrassed.” When she asks why the men are all nude, he pauses in a shameful and exasperated gesture, adding another nice comedic beat, and then turns and makes a quick escape.
As he’s done throughout his career, Veiroj here observes his main characters with sympathy, curiosity, and, when deserved, a gentle, instructive irony. His style reminds me of Claire Denis in the domestic mode of Nenette and Boni (2005) and 35 Shots of Rum (2008). As a middle-aged father myself, even I’m bored with characters like Belmonte—perhaps especially bored, as I spend more than enough time occupying that limited and subjective perspective—but Veiroj’s grace and humour make Belmonte not only bearable to watch but a pleasure. There’s a simple, unvarnished wisdom in his kindness, as when he manufactures opportunities for Delgado and Molinar Eijo to inhabit and embody a recognizably loving father-daughter relationship. In a film that is barely 75 minutes long, he prioritizes quiet moments in which the two actors simply sit together on a couch, take a weekend boat ride, or share bowls of soup, their comfort with one another immediately translating as deep affection. Before she asks about the “embarrassed” figure, Celeste tells Belmonte, matter-of-factly, that she doesn’t like another of his paintings. Veiroj cuts from a close-up of her searching eyes to an insert of two distorted faces in conflict. ”It’s like an interior dialogue,” he offers in defense. Celeste’s explanation for why she dislikes the piece cuts to the quick in a way that manages to conform to wisdom-of-a-child boilerplate while also being genuinely affecting: “You’re not that bad, Dad.”
And there’s the rub. That billions of people have struggled to be good parents, suffered disappointments with their families, and endured midlife crises doesn’t make the banality of those experiences any less profound or wrought to the particular individual who is living in that particular moment. Artistic treatments of the subject are common enough, but few escape the temptation to simply repackage that banality as farce. To be clear, Belmonte is a joke, as are all of us performing in this stupid human comedy. The final image of the film is a long shot of him walking in the middle of a busy highway toward the camera, carrying a large canvas with him. Like Camus’s Sisyphus pushing his boulder, I suppose we must imagine Belmonte happy. He’s really not that bad.