The Spaniards Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, one of the most glamorous couples in cinema, both in the city and on screen, present this Tuesday at the Venice Film Festival the highly anticipated “Bunker”, which tells the story of a marriage in crisis against a backdrop of paranoia linked to the climate crisis and rising inequalities.
The feature film, written and directed by Frenchman Florian Zeller, has been raising expectations for months, given the resemblance between the fictional characters - who in the film have been together for 17 years - and the performers, who got married in 2010.
“From the very beginning, what also interested me was having them together on screen. Because I thought it would be a unique way to capture something special about a real couple,” the director explained Tuesday during a press conference.
Asked what he had put from his own marriage into this role, Javier Bardem replied “nothing”. “We’re really good at fiction. Otherwise, we would not survive in this profession,” continued the Spanish actor.
Bunker tells the story of Miguel, a renowned architect who considers accepting an offer from a tech billionaire to build a bunker in Hawaii. His wife Sofia does not look favorably on this lucrative project, which gives rise to doubts in her about her husband and their 17 years of relationship. The film opens with a scene in which Miguel tells friends at a restaurant about his encounter with Sofia, who watches him intently. “Even the most beautiful stories can begin with a misunderstanding,” remarked one of the guests.
Florian Zeller, whose first feature film The Father won two Oscars in 2021, imagined Bunker for Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, taking inspiration from another famous film featuring a couple under tension: Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick, with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
The director was intrigued by the fact that the two Spanish actors had never played a married couple on film.
I wanted to “try to approach a subject that interests me, namely the burning authenticity of the truth”, underlined Florian Zeller on Tuesday, while saying he had drawn a border “between reality and fiction”. Penélope Cruz assured that she had “no doubt. Because it was with Florian, and from our first meeting with him, we both loved the script,” said the actress. Javier Bardem, 57, and Penélope Cruz, 52, have shot around ten films together, from the fiery Jambon, Jambon (1992), their first joint project, to the thriller Everybody Knows, released in 2018.
“There is a good balance in the way we talk about work. Obviously, when we prepare a film together, we talk about it a lot, but we didn't do it very often, it came naturally, like every five years,” continued Penélope Cruz.
The two performers met again at the last Cannes Film Festival, but with two different films: Bardem in the role of an authoritarian father in The Loved One, and Cruz as a cabaret singer in La bola negra.
Bardem and Cruz, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, are regulars at the Lido. She won the Volpi Cup for her role in Madres paralelas (2021) by Pedro Almodóvar while he won the supreme award for Mar adentro (2004) and Before the night (2000), a double that few actors can boast of.
