A glamorous Penélope Cruz can't transcend spotty comedy 'The Queen of Spain'

Review: A glamorous Penélope Cruz can’t transcend spotty comedy ‘The Queen of Spain’

By Sheri Linden

Aug. 17, 2017 1:05 PM PT

By turns sedate and breathless, the pitch-perfect 1950s newsreel footage that opens Fernando Trueba’s new comedy promises an intriguing mix of fiction and history. But though “The Queen of Spain” looks terrific and features a warm, glamorous performance by Penélope Cruz, that promise is fulfilled only fitfully in this valentine to moviemaking.

Reuniting many of the characters from 1998’s “The Girl of Your Dreams,” Trueba attempts to duplicate its winning formula, putting a troupe of self-involved actors to the test against a fascist regime. The earlier film was set in Hitler-era Berlin; here, the central characters are on home turf in Franco’s U.S.-friendly Madrid.

A bustling studio welcomes an American contingent, led by a John Ford-ish director (Clive Revill) and a blacklisted screenwriter (Mandy Patinkin), for a costume extravaganza about Queen Isabella. In the title role is Cruz’s dazzling Macarena Granada, a former Andalusian ingénue now ensconced in the Hollywood firmament. Soon she’s spearheading a plan to rescue her onetime director and lover, Blas Fontiveros (Antonio Resines), from one of the generalissimo’s labor camps.

Regardless of whether “Queen” is a sequel (Trueba insists it’s not), the filmmaker doesn’t give its back story, its questions of collaboration and accommodation, the necessary clarity and zing. Ultra-lightweight farce predominates, sometimes awkwardly. The less said about Cary Elwes’ predatory leading man, the better.

Had the comedy been sharper, this movie-loving movie might have convincingly meshed its Technicolor caricatures and antifascist heroics.

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