Watch Goya in Bordeaux For Free

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Best movie ever!

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

The film opens with a dream sequence, Goya walking in pajamas at night in the streets of a French city, with couples people going about their business, it looks and feels like a Saturday night in the Spring.The rest of the movie is about the same, floating here and there with some great music and dance numbers to break up the dream like sequences.His conversations with his daughter are touching and a good way to brush up on one's Spanish.Most of the scenes take place at night. He favors the night because of the effect it has on his perception of the hues of the paint.If you are interested in art, or like to paint this is a great movie to watch especially in you are in bed and ready to fall asleep.Definitely a movie to watch at night.Enjoy.

The patterning motif of 'Goya in Bordeaux' is the spiral, which Goya claims is like life. So this is not the linear historical biography of the artist we have come to expect from Hollywood, moving inexorably from birth, through success and failure, to death. In its circular motion, its conflating time, history, imagination, art, fantasy and dream, the film 'Goya' most resembles is Ruiz's astonishing Proust adaptation, 'Time Regained'. Here the story progresses through the labyrinth of an artist's mind, where the narrative proceeds from a chance memory or incident rather than chronological order. History is monumental, written in stone, immovable - 'Goya', on the other hand, emphasises, fluidity, instability and fragility - the status of any particular scene is always in doubt, such is the complex nature of Saura's narration. The film appears to begins with a dream - an old man wakes up in a foreign land; he does not know where he is, he walks down strange streets, bewildered by the foreign language and customs, having wandered down the obligatary white corridor, before catching a vision of an old, dead love. The next scene, where a lover and friend bemoan his tendency in his illness to peregrinate, suggests that it wasn't a dream. This ambiguity continues throughout. After all, the narrative concerns a dying man, whose life flashes before him, memories flooding back of critical biographical moments in the artist's life - his work at Court; his affair with the Duchess of Alba; his exile in France for liberal sympathies - but these are never merely historical, but revealing of Goya's aesthetic as it developed, theoretically and in practice. The biographical emphasis seems justified in that this development is linked to increasing misanthropy, terror, fear of madness and senility. One of his fears is of being in unrestrained imagination, and some of his later, horrifyingly dark works are a far cry from the dutiful Court pictures, even if these burst with a barely contained passion. Goya's development - from patronage to exiled self-expression - marks a crucial development in Western art towards the Romantic, the solipsistic. Goya lived in times of tyranny, barbarity, slaughter, revolution but history is always filtered through his lurid sensibility, as if with Goya came the pessimistic idea that there is no such thing as objective reality. Saura borrows many devices from Ruiz - the shifting mise-en-scene that flows through time and space, including the aging artist in a dark room watching a gloriously sunny aristocratic garden party decades earlier; or the device of the artists' various selves existing in the same frame. This sense of a personal history as opposed to a chronological one is emphasised in the flimsiness of the mise-en-scene, a literal creation of light and screens. Comparing Saura to Ruiz, however, is like comparing Arnold Bennett to Virginia Woolf. Saura is simply too heavy-handed to achieve the temporal fleet-footedness necessary. His ideas are frequently literal or banal, his need to transpose everything as dance climaxes in a massacre ballet of obscene bathos. Whereas Ruiz sublimely caught the Proustian rush, Saura cannot hope to reach the visual disturbance and energy of Goya, and contents himself with defacing his work (blood spilling from paintings, etc.) Where Proust's end was a beginning (the decision to write the book he was actually finishing), Saura weighs himself down with portentousness; where Proust's ideas were grounded in a compelling plot of war and social comedy, Saura gets lost in ever-decreasing circles. I'm sure there's a resonant comparison being made between Goya and Saura himself, especially in the speech of regret preceding the massacre - both men liberals serving totalitarian regimes. Again, as with 'Tango', the film's main interest is its exquisite score.

I do not know the price tag for this film, but my guess is that they could have used more dough. The Napoleonic Wars are hard to do on a budget. Tableau representations of Goya's works were charming. They went on too long and the acting added in was pure ham. The whole thing seemed a disjointed mess to me. I was reminded of Ken Russell's "The Music Lovers" in which Richard Chamberlain has a poetic delirium from typhus. Goya was obviously an accomplished political artist, yet the film portrays him as a narcissistic bumbler. As an American, I was impressed with all the overtly sentimental sexism and ageism at the heart of the movie. Old men obviously all dote and drool. Young granddaughters obviously grin and bear it. Wink. Wink. It was all too wholesome to be surreal and too surreal to be taken seriously as history. I had great hopes for it, but I was disappointed.

I loved this movie, although it started out slow, and there was much symbolism. I found some scenes very touching, and found myself thinking about other scenes after the movie. The movie was very picturesque, but I found the music even more impressive. There was one score that was repeated all through the movie and during the end credits and I cannot get it out of my head. I hope to find the soundtrack somewhere. I should mention that there is not much of a storyline. This is the story of Goya's life, which as I understand is not very eventful. However, the story telling is just beautiful, and I couldn't keep my eyes of the screen, while my husband slept all through the movie.