It is a pity Goya's Ghosts has opened after the closing of the Royal Academy's fine exhibition Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution 1760-1830. The film is set in Spain during that turbulent period and concerns the changing relationship between artists, the church and the state, and gives a major role to Francisco de Goya, prominent in the Academy show.
The film is also remarkable for bringing together for the third time two gifted film-makers, both in their mid-seventies, one of them a highly prolific screenwriter, the other one of the least productive directors, both of them interested in nonconformists and people with a complex relationship with authority. Jean-Claude Carriere has produced dozens of scripts for directors as varied as Bunuel (they collaborated on six films) and Peter Brook. Goya's Ghosts is only the fastidious Milos Forman's seventh picture since leaving Czechoslovakia in 1968. They first worked together in 1971 on Taking Off, a delightful comedy about the American generation gap and the Sixties revolution, and then on Valmont, the less well-known of the two versions of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
Their new picture is a venture into the period immediately following that of the Laclos novel and it is one they've already visited separately, Forman with Amadeus, Carriere with Wajda's Danton and Bunuel's Le Fantome de la liberte, which, apart from having 'ghost' in the title, has Goya's The Shootings of May 3rd 1808 behind the opening credits. The film is far from being a biopic of Goya (Stellan Skarsgard with a suitable prosthetic nose). It's a work of fiction set against a particular time of change and unrest, but manifestly refers to the modern world, to Iraq and Iran, to eastern Europe and Russia, to current dogmatic conflict and Guantanamo Bay.
The film begins superbly in 1792 at a meeting of the Inquisition in Madrid to discuss Goya's series of surreal, brutally satirical etchings Los Caprichos, about death, vice, witches and the abuses of the church. The Grand Inquisitor (Bunuel regular Michael Lonsdale) and most of the clerics are nonplussed and uncertain of their role in seemingly more liberal times. The imposing Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem), a friend and patron of Goya, is the only one to understand the brilliance and power of the artist's work. For this reason, he sees the popularity of the etchings as a reason to increase, not slacken, the Inquisition's activities. For this reason, Ines (Natalie Portman), the beautiful, lively daughter of a rich merchant, is picked up by the Inquisition and under unspeakable torture makes an absurd confession to practising Jewish rites.
Using Goya, a close family friend, as a go-between, her father invites Lorenzo to dinner. After the priest claims that nothing would induce him to make a false confession, he's compelled by force to sign a declaration that he's the son of a gorilla and a chimpanzee. This leads to Lorenzo's disgrace and flight, but does nothing for the incarcerated Ines, who's been raped by the lustful priest. Meanwhile, Goya goes his way, remaining in favour with the church and the court and justifying himself through the honesty of his portraiture. This half of the film is harsh, amusing stuff and, for Forman, it mirrors the Czechoslovakia he grew up in; he first conceived the idea of a film about the Inquisition as a student. As for Carriere, anti-clericalism has been a major element in his work, not only in the Bunuel movies, but also in Viva Maria!, Le Voleur and Milou en mai, the three he wrote with Louis Malle.
The announcement of Louis XVI's execution comes as King Carlos (admirably played by Randy Quaid) is taking Goya to task for a painting of the Queen - 'But it doesn't make the Queen beautiful' - and the movie jumps ahead 15 years to 1808. It takes on a tougher, more darkly comic tone. Lorenzo returns to Spain with the French invaders. Now he's a rich Bonapartist, as devoted to liberty, equality and fraternity as he was to the severest doctrines of the church, and he'll garrotte anyone who tells him nay. The Inquisition is abolished, Lorenzo's former colleagues are condemned to death and Ines is released from her dungeon. But she's now mad and is put into an asylum, a setting pretty familiar to Forman (eg, Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).
Meanwhile, Goya works as court painter to the new French king, and there's a marvellously comic scene in which Lorenzo offers Spanish royal treasures to Napoleon's brother to be shipped back to Paris: Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights is rejected as not to the emperor's taste, Velazquez's Las Meninas is snapped up. Goya is now deaf, which the film uses as some kind of metaphor, and he goes everywhere with a signing interpreter. He's determined to help Ines after feeling guilty over his failure to protect her. But irony piles on irony as the British army arrives and the Spanish monarchy is restored, accompanied by moral and social disorder. Goya continues to labour on his Disasters of War, while becoming official painter for yet another court, and has a new patron in the Duke of Wellington.
This is a most engaging, thoughtful, beautifully mounted film, with suitably painterly camera-work by Javier Aguirresarobe. The portrait of Wellington (the one stolen from the National Gallery over which James Bond does a double-take when he sees it in Dr No's lair) figures in a wonderful montage behind the final credits. No one should leave this film until the lights come up.