The movie Goya in Bordeaux did a good job giving a sense of Goya’s art and the circumstances under which he created it. The color palette of the movie was very interesting to me, and I felt many scenes reflected the style of prints well. Many scenes were monochromatic, which is similar to how many prints are made. The color red was heavily used, and the red acted as a nice compliment to the dark scenes of Goya’s art and the chilling feel of the movie when Goya saw his work coming alive or transforming into memories of the past. Goya, portrayed predominantly in white, was nicely contrasted to the Duchess of Alba, portrayed in black, who seemed to be a figure representing death.
While the movie visually interesting, I found the convoluted plot to be confusing at times. The switches between his time at the end of his life with his daughter and his youth with the duchess occasionally left me confused about who the characters he was interacting with were, and left me questioning their significance to him. This, however, was beneficial in terms of portraying the struggles Goya went through in losing his hearing and the troubles he faced in his life with his illness and inability to let go of the past.
I agree that the film was confusing; sometimes I thought of it as a representation of Goya’s artwork in itself, rather than a film that was meant to be a strict biography of Goya’s life. I think I got a better sense of Goya’s style than his history, although we did get to see how his loss of hearing and hesitations about the court manifested in his art. I’m not sure if it would have been possible to do both a rich history of Goya *and* make the film reminiscent of his artwork at the same time. Maybe that was one of the sacrifices the director considered.