An interesting modification and extension of the theatrical effects that director Carlos Saura (and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro) developed and perfected in Flamenco and Tango: the play of colored lights, the illuminated screens, the transparent scrims, so that what appears to be a solid wall, for example, will dissolve before our eyes to give us a view of the hallway on the other side. That sort of thing. The narrated flashbacks, in which the elderly, exiled, and stone-deaf artist parades his past life in front of his very young daughter, are a fairly conventional device. And there is the common problem in such circumstances of the old protagonist (the once handsome face of Francisco Rabal, now a puffy, bumpy, toadlike thing) not matching the younger protagonist (the bland José Coronado), or the flesh-and-bone model not matching her immortal portrait (Maribel Verdú is nonetheless an enchantress in her own way, just not in the Maja's way). Given the subject matter, Saura could scarcely resist being competitively painterly, but he (or, again, his cinematographer) is an artist as well, with a fully three-dimensional use of space and light. This is a movie inside which you can truly move around, a limpid dreamscape à la Dali, Delvaux, de Chirico. And its affinity with the artist carries into credible details of the vocation: the ring of candles affixed to a hat brim for painting after dark; the translucent cloth stretched across the window above a work table for the 19th-century equivalent of a "soft white" desk lamp; or the comprehensible, the sharable, moment of revelation in front of a canvas by Velázquez. And the stylized battle scenes that form the basis for Goya's "Disasters of War" keep the work properly in the realm of imagination: they don't cheapen it by downgrading the artist to a mere copyist. Still, it's hard to say what, in its slow, stately, pageantlike procession, the movie ultimately amounts to. As with so many culture-vulture movies, its weight comes (or is confidently expected to come) from the subject matter itself, the presence of a master. But the only master who is actually present is Carlos Saura, and he seems not entirely disinclined to hitch a ride on Goya's coattails. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.