A Matador's Mistress (2008)

People are voting emotionally.

Let's be realistic.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

nice costumes, great cast. and a lot of crumbs. the sin of film is the lost of story. nothing coherent, few poetic images, many good intentions and a fake result - too pink, too kitsch, too unrealistic. the solutions are many for save the story. but the great problem is the absence of a clear project. it is a film about corrida and a legendary matador, about love and infidelity, about the vulnerability of a hero but nothing profound - only a large collection of sketches without a real purpose. for Adrien Brody and Penelope Cruz the film is only occasion for another role. but that is the basic problem. why that actors for a confuse project ?a film like many others. not bad. only uninspired.

I'm not really into Spain or bullfighting. So if this this movie just appealed at first for the dynamic Penélope, finally, it totally hooks me. The first great thing is the talent of Adrian Brody. It's true as Pené said that he the most beautiful ugly man but he exudes such humanity that he is also the most underrated actor! Here, he is totally convincing as a legendary sportsman and shy boyfriend.Next, the director (a newcomer for me) is talented as well: he has a great "eye" and offers totally stunning and poetic visuals: I like how he plays with Spain flag, with the washing as the red cape for the bull. He does the same parallel with love and bullfight. At the end, the use of revolving doors enhances a lot the drama. His cinematography is vivid, full of colors and we can really appreciate the Spanish culture (thus, I realized that it keeps its Arabic history as well).At last, the two big themes (passion, bullfight) are depicted like a mystic experience. It's not just a simple romance but a burning love and bullfight is beyond sport, it's a tradition. So, as our two lovers are passionate but also defective, the movie heads full speed at a tragedy and the editing is totally right as it ticks like a clock, balancing with the past and present.It's true that my French DVD is only 88 minutes and the movie is dynamic without time-out. In conclusion, it's a superb surprise and I urge even the anti bullfight to watch it because it's not a absurd slaughter!

Nice costumes and great actors do not make a movie great. A good story does. Too bad the original writer, Bill Crown, was bumped out of the process by those who hijacked the project. I guess Karma decided the fate of the film. 1200 pages of research were prepared but obviously not used. This is a story about a real man living in real times. Taking poetic liberties is fine, but there has to be authenticity for a film like this to work.Brody hot off his Oscar was perfectly suited to the role. Penelope Cruise, wisely selected as the love interest also internationally recognized, should have brought forth faithful followers. A formula that would have worked had not the intentions of the story been skewed so far off mark.

"Matador's Mistress" might be profitably viewed - and not so easily underestimated - if we try to see it as a work of art in its own right, that is, as much more than a dramatic tribute to the legendary bull-fighter Manolete or a cinematic rendering of his great passion for Lupe. Manolete's tale has been elevated to an archetypal tragedy of Love-Death. Director Meyjes has put right under our noses the mad mechanics of our wildest dream, in full confidence that it will fascinate romantic viewers without their fully registering what's going on. But the clues to a psychological study of machismo are all here. Why else does the film open with the brazen insult that Lupe has scrawled in lipstick on Manolete's mirror, an act of humiliation, ripping into her lover's essential wound? And why does it alternate, so suggestively, the scene of Manolete's and Lupe's love-making with that of the fight in which Manolete daringly caresses the bull? And Manolete's relation to his mother, plainly making Lupe her surrogate? This romance turns on the little secret that he gives up in his sexual climax, in the little death that secretly prepares the viewer for his last words. Whatever the historical relationship between these lovers, it has been taken up artfully into an exploration of the matador's psyche, and by extension, the psyche of Spain. Lupe plays a cruel game with Manolete, because the psychic roots of his devotion are so exposed, more than any woman wants to see. Yet the film asks: is there ever any other source of obsession with Woman? Lupe can only despise Manolete, even as she is ravished by him. Such a love can only find one resolution.A genuine work of art.