“We Are All Uxbal”: Narrative Complexity in the Urban Borderlands in Biutiful

halfway through the narrative of biutiful (2010), the film’s central character, Uxbal (Javier Bardem), lost in a spiral of misery, suffering, and death, walks along an overpass at sunset, speaking on his cell phone. As it follows the protagonist’s progress, the frame lingers on the hustle and bustle of the urban spectacle underneath, the colorful and restless city competing for attention with the character. Oblivious to the life around him, Uxbal suddenly stops to look at a flock of migrant birds flying away over a dark blue sky, which lifts him momentarily from his wretchedness and transports him into a brief reverie. The shot immediately strikes a chord with those familiar with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s oeuvre. A similar shot of a flock of birds at dusk precedes Paul’s (Sean Penn) initial ruminations about death and life at the beginning of the scrambled narrative of 21 Grams (2003). In Biutiful, this climactic scene, played to the eerie and mesmerizing mood of Sebastian Escofet’s “Meditation #9,” simultaneously encapsulates both the film’s tight, even suffocating focus on a single protagonist and its ultimate inability to tell a conventional single-protagonist narrative. Although the scene—and the film in general—focuses on Uxbal’s relentless journey toward death, the myriad lives and stories around him are presented with such vividness and poignancy that they challenge and disrupt the movie’s efforts to stick to its single protagonist.

This article explores the coexistence of these two divergent narrative drives in Biutiful and their implications in the construction of the film’s central character. In the underbelly of the city of Barcelona, Uxbal makes a living as a middleman between undocumented Chinese immigrants, Senegalese vendors, Spanish foremen, and corrupt police officers. When he is diagnosed with an advanced prostate cancer, he feels the urge to put his affairs in order, which in his case means finding a reliable person to take care of and raise his two children. When the bipolar mother of his two children proves unfit for the job, he finds a surrogate mother and unexpected caregiver in Ige (Diaryatou Daff), a Senegalese immigrant whose husband has recently been deported. His attempt to “improve” the living conditions of the Chinese workers at the warehouse results in the death of twenty-five people, an event that precipitates Uxbal’s free fall into a spiral of suffering, misery, and death. Uxbal’s centrality in the various border narratives that make up the film turns him into an embodiment of the concept of the border. His character is impregnated with the stories, experiences, and suffering of those human beings—mainly undocumented immigrants—whom he comes across in his restless wanderings in the streets of Barcelona. He is both the node that joins the rest of the characters and the line that separates them. He also represents the intrinsic ambivalence of the border itself: nurturing and destructive, ripe for both transnational exchanges and ethnic violence.

At first sight, Iñárritu’s reliance on a central character who guides spectators through the narrative in an almost strictly chronological manner constitutes a drastic difference from his three previous features: Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams, and Babel (2006). It might be argued that the most obvious reason for this change was the end of his collaboration with scriptwriter and novelist Guillermo Arriaga. Arriaga had been, along with the director, the most visible figure of a creative team that had remained stable since Amores Perros and that also included cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, composer Gustavo Santaolalla, production designer Brigitte Broch, and editor Stephen Mirrione. Although Arriaga had written the script of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada for director Tommy Lee Jones (2005), and both Santaolalla and, especially, Prieto had continued to work with other directors, their most significant work had been done in Iñárritu’s films, and the strength of these movies had clearly derived from their collaborative work. Their impact on the final products is so evident that “Alejandro González Iñárritu” ought to be seen not as the name...