Not quite as bad as some critics said, and yet also a long way from great, Milos Forman turns in a sloppy and dispiritingly disjointed work here. Which may not entirely be his fault, for the film shows signs of editing-room butchery and production problems, but that would not have saved it either way from a corny and ill-focused storyline. A terrible pity, because it is a project of potential: a film charting the painter Francisco Goya’s (Stellan Skarsgard) perspective on Spanish society in the late Enlightenment, and the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion.
Unfortunately, this perspective is awkwardly realised through his relationship with two fictional characters: Lorenzo (Javier Bardem), a priest of the Inquisition who tries to revive the old practises in order to repress new tides of thought; and Inés (Natalie Portman), a merchant’s daughter and one of Goya’s favourite muses, who is accused of being a “Judaiser” when it’s noticed she doesn’t like eating pork. She is tortured and sent to rot in prison when she confesses to end the pain. Her father, Tomás (José Luis Gómez, very good), uses Goya to ask for Lorenzo’s help, for Goya is painting Lorenzo’s portrait. The priest, prompted to check on Inés, is stricken by her beauty, and he takes advantage of her when she’s shackled naked in her cell. In the film’s best scene, Tomás invites Lorenzo to dinner, strings him up from the ceiling in approximation of the Inquisition’s tortures, and forces him to sign a confession to being a monkey, as proof of the Inquisition’s idiocies. But the church officials, led by the unctuous Father Gregorio (Michael Lonsdale), still won’t let her go, and Lorenzo soon has to flee the country when Tomás gives his confession to the King (Randy Quaid, oddly cast to say the least, but decent).
Fifteen years later, when the French invade, Ines is finally released, a withered and sickly hag, pining for the daughter she had in jail to Lorenzo, who, as absurd screenwriting or fate would have it, has come back to Spain as a French legate. The obvious point, as it soon proves, is that Lorenzo has swapped one all-sweeping conviction for another, with nearly exactly the same prerogatives. He and Goya, who has gone deaf in the meantime, search for Inés’ now-grown daughter Alicia (Portman again), and the painter finds her working as a prostitute. Lorenzo tries to pack her off to America, but she and other whores are captured by British soldiers, so Alicia returns to Madrid as the mistress of an English officer, there to cheer on Lorenzo’s final execution when he decides to stand on his principals and refuse to repent.
The film’s relevance as parable isn’t elided, as it purposefully explores torture as a tool of state and the intricate relationship between repressive violence and fanatical conviction, and knowingly portrays the Bonapartist soldiers expecting to be greeted as liberators. Forman and co-writer Jean-Claude Carriere also cast a rather trashy eye on the sado-mashochistic violence inflicted on women’s bodies in the intensely sexualised humiliation encoded within Inquisitorial practises. But it adds up to little, because virtually nothing in the film develops any real substance: it’s stranded fatally between wanting to be a work of genuine historical portraiture, and grandiose yarn-spinning.
The characterisations are barely coherent, and the themes fragmented by the silly plot, which isn’t handled with the verve required of epic melodrama, and certainly can’t be considered in the realms of seriousness of its obvious precursor, Andrei Rublev. The fairly absorbing early segments are betrayed by amazingly flat anti-climaxes, leading to a finale that tries for ironic tragedy and yet carries no weight whatsoever. Goya is practically absent from his own film, the very real and intense artistic and social conscience that inspired his famous sketches of the war unforgivably fumbled in the portrayal. Forman manages a few interesting images, as when the deaf Goya perceives street-fighting as soundless flashes of light and smoke, and yet Forman completely fails to effectively conjure a sense of a fragmented, violence-wracked society: his montages are ineffective and disconnected from the overall texture. The actors do what they can: Portman has a blast in playing dewy young Inés, twisted older Inés, and fiery Alicia. But the film is a colossal failure.
