Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s ‘The Beloved’ Stages a Father-Daughter Reckoning That Doesn’t Quite Cohere

More interesting than alluring, Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Cannes competition title and TIFF Special Presentation El ser querido (or The Beloved) follows a fearsome director trying to reconnect with his distant daughter by casting her in a role. It has the misfortune of bearing a passing familiarity to Sentimental Value, Joaquim Trier’s Norwegian Cannes darling and Oscar winner from last year, about a similar subject. However, the two films could not be more different in style and scope. For one thing, The Beloved traces its central dynamic through an entire production. For another, it trades less in frigid restraint and more in suffocating closeups, which capture nuanced performances that prove deeply affecting, even if the movie around them doesn’t fully cohere.

Sorogoyen kicks things off with an incredible 20-minute lunch meeting between revered Spanish filmmaker Esteban Martínez (Javier Bardem) and his estranged adult daughter Emilia Vera (Victoria Luengo), a small-time actress working service jobs to get by. The offer comes as no surprise to her. It quickly becomes clear that we’ve been dropped into an ongoing reignition of their relationship, which helps nudge things into thorny territory rather quickly, as the scene ebbs and flows between genial and frictional, threatening to explode as the camera closes in on both characters. However, despite the characters having communicated before, Sorogoyen maintained the actors’ spontaneity by ensuring this was the first time they came face to face, after having rehearsed separately. The trepidation is palpable.

The lines between professional and personal grow increasingly murky, as both Esteban and Emilia insist that they’re mere co-workers, but the lingering hurt between them suggests otherwise—especially when it flares up on set. The movie, titled Desert, is a period piece about Spanish and French colonialism in Western Sahara, and offers Emilia the chance to, as she puts it, finally play a character of contradictions. However, while Desert’s 1930s setting raises curiosities behind the scenes—close crew members ask Esteban why he chose the topic—his delving into Spain’s political and cultural past is seldom meaningfully tethered to his relationship to his personal history.

Granted, his refusal to adopt this line of thinking (despite it being suggested more than once) is a worthwhile explanation, at least at first, but it’s an emotional idea The Beloved quickly drops. Instead, his on-set temper is ignited by private conversations with Emilia behind the scenes, where she demands acknowledgement—in careful, roundabout ways—of his abandonment and mistreatment of her when she was a child.

A handful of scenes beat with riveting emotional tension, as Sorogoyen wields movement and atmosphere to tell his story wordlessly. As Esteban anxiously anticipates Emilia’s first meeting with his wife and young sons, he listens to preliminary tracks from his movie’s score, which add tremendous gravitas to a simple shot of his daughter approaching from afar. On the opposite end of the sonic spectrum, a quietly pulsing scene between father and daughter unfolds inside the production’s video village tent, which bellows in the wind, its flapping and rattling filling the heavy silence between them.

However, the movie’s use of visual texture isn’t quite so controlled. It switches, in moments seemingly unplanned, between mediums and aspect ratios, and occasionally uses black and white, as though swapping points of view between Sorogoyen’s camera, Esteban’s and some other, behind-the-scenes footage of the set. But there’s seldom motivation for swapping between these fabrics, which adds little to the story as it unfolds.

This freewheeling use of formats, during sizable ensemble scenes, tends to clash with the more meticulous one-on-one drama, leaving The Beloved feeling torn between wildly different approaches that never fully gel. It moves, therefore, quite gingerly between subplots, never fully finding itself through the relationship around which its entire story pivots.

That said, Bardem and Luengo make a meal out of what they’re given, delivering devastatingly true-to-life performances as artists trying to make their difficult situation work, and as wounded human beings trying to get by (and coexist) inconspicuously, even though their faces and postures tend to say otherwise. While the movie’s other disconnects work against it, these intentional ones, by performers walking razor-thin emotional tightropes, ensure The Beloved makes for an intriguing watch, if not a wholly visceral one.