Rating: Four out of five stars
As married movie stars go, in terms of glamour and acting heft if not booze and dysfunction, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem might just be the modern-day Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
In Bunker, which had its world premiere last night at the Venice Film Festival, the great Spanish duo play a couple whose marriage comes under intense stress.
We can only hope that, unlike Burton and Taylor 60 years ago in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? the on-screen squabbles aren’t fuelled by personal strife.
Bunker is written and directed by Florian Zeller, the French playwright whose first feature film, The Father (2020), bagged Anthony Hopkins an Oscar and focused on the impact of an elderly man’s dementia on his family.
This time he turns his attention away from fatherhood to scrutinise a marriage. Bardem plays Miguel, an acclaimed Spanish architect living in affluence in London with his fragrant wife Sofia (Cruz), who works in publishing, and their two daughters.
Ostensibly, the family seems to have it all, but there are obvious portents in Sofia’s observation that things perceived as solid often end up breaking, whereas fragile things, demanding more care, can be longer-lasting.
Marital friction develops when Miguel is invited by a world-famous tech billionaire (think Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg) to build him a luxurious Armageddon-proof bunker in Hawaii. Money is no object but Sofia hates the idea. Her husband’s other design projects include hospitals and opera houses; much worthier enterprises, she thinks, than indulging a business tycoon’s fears about the collapse of civilisation.
Power couple: Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz last night at the ‘Bunker’ screening in Venice
Meanwhile, Miguel is distracted by an issue closer to home. At the end of his garden, a working-class neighbour, Toby (Stephen Graham), has knocked through a garage wall. He intends to fit a window and convert the garage into some kind of studio.
Miguel is enraged. Building schemes are for him, not others, and certainly not in his own back yard (even though his own ultra-modern extension must have created no end of disruption).
He offers to pay for the hole to be bricked up, plus some more cash for Toby’s trouble. If that doesn’t work, he says, he will engage lawyers. For Sofia, Miguel’s response to the hole proves that his values have become warped. Money talks louder than humanity.
To ensure that none of this gets too oppressive, Zeller throws in a few comic flourishes.
The melodramatic secrecy around the identity of the billionaire is played nicely for laughs, and early in the film there’s an amusing mickey-take of modern art, when at a gallery opening Miguel and Sofia look in bafflement at a series of entirely black paintings with titles such as ‘My mother in an evening gown’.
This cues up a later, visual gag, when the paintings are echoed by the tarpaulin that Toby has placed over the offending hole.
Zeller loves narrative symmetry, so much that sometimes his stories can seem a little too pat. Here, there is a decidedly unsubtle parallel between the bunker envisaged by the billionaire (played in a slick cameo by Paul Dano) and Miguel’s own home as he becomes increasingly obsessed with privacy.
But what a pleasure it is to see Bardem and Cruz, slipping effortlessly between English and Spanish, playing off one another with such panache.
I will be surprised if Bunker comes out top of the heap when the Venice awards are dished out at the weekend, but it is an intelligent picture about the price of human decency… and that is always worth mulling on.
Bunker is due to open in the UK in February
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