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Biutiful, by Alejandro González Iñárritu
Alejandro González Iñárritu is the most exciting filmmaker to emerge in the twenty-first century, and perhaps also the most polarizing. Depending upon whom you believe, he is either the greatest Mexican director since Buñuel or a lazy disciple of Tarantino. His experiments with filmic time have been called both sublimely radical and pointlessly derivative. The big metaphysical themes with which his movies earnestly grapple- violence, religion, the value of life, human connectedness- are either the stuff of epic or "resolutely banal ," as A .0 . Scott wrote recently in the New York Times. Yet the four feature-length films by this relatively young director - he was born in 1 963 - have racked up a legion of devoted fans and an impressive list of awards, including the Young Critics Award at Cannes for his stunning debut, Amores Perros (2000) , and the Festival's Best Director prize for Babel (2006) , along with a slew of Academy Award nominations, most recently for his latest, Biutiful (2010).
Part of the reason why Iñárritu 's work has been hard for some critics to love is surely the challenging, unconventional forms that he prefers. Each of his first three films- Amores Perros, 21 Grams (2003), and Babel, which are sometimes referred to as a trilogy -has a defiantly nonlinear structure, with three apparently separate storylines held together by less-than-evident connections. Their complexity virtually demands repeated viewing: on first glance, many of the details get lost in the blur. (Babel, the most commercially successful of these films by far, is also, relatively speaking, the easiest to follow.) The New Yorker critic David Denby used much of a long essay purportedly devoted to examining "the new disorder" in film narrative- starting with Tarantino 's Pulp Fiction, in which the storylines are assembled out of order, and the 2001 cult hit Memento , which unfolds in reverse time - to bash Iñárritu for this kind of experimentation. "AU the pieces are there to be put together in our heads, but the rich ambivalence of art somehow slips away as we reconstruct the way one thing connects to another," Denby complained.
But Iñárritu's works never have the spliced-and-diced feeUng of Pulp Fiction, nor do they celebrate, as...