Importantly never seen having actually fun with their money, and despite being the focus of international financial scandals and manhunts, Paesa and Roldan are seen to don their pajamas at the end of each day. The effect is of being manhandled from one scenario and location to another without much thought to such issues as emotional flow or, more seriously, characterization. Francisco Paesa, the shadowy, swindling real-life anti-hero of Alberto Rodriguez’s flash, turbo-charged politico-financial thriller Smoke and Mirrors, would love to have pulled off the same trick, and his dream almost comes true in a film in which Paesa and the extensive, corrupt crew surrounding him are revealed blurrily at best. The deeper motivations of such potentially fascinating men deserve closer scrutiny than they are afforded here, and there’s the sense that the scriptwriters don’t actually like their creations enough to be really interested in them. One of the great virtues of Rodriguez's Unit Seven (also based on real events) and Marshland was the strong sense of character and place, fundamental to grounding them. EMAIL ME. In the words of Baudelaire and Verbal Kint, the cleverest trick the devil ever pulled off was to convince the world that he doesn’t exist. ", "The Helen Reddy story and the song that inspired a revolution", 'The Opening Act' Interviews with Jimmy O. Yang & Steve Byrne. A quietly-spoken shabby little man, Paesa is a poisonous figure of apparently limitless greed and an amoral blindness to the human consequences of his actions. Jonathan Holland © 2020 The Hollywood Reporter What to Watch Now Movie Reviews TV Reviews Roundtables Podcasts ... and most of Smoke and Mirrors is the story of his elaborate attempt at ... true story of a … All rights reserved. Playing out like a Hispanic Ocean’s Eleven, Smoke is indeed an enjoyably breathless and spectacular walk along a high wire which seems permanently about to snap but which never quite does. San Sebastián International Film Festival, 64th San Sebastián International Film Festival, "Eduard Fernández, Concha de Plata por su Paesa de 'El hombre de las mil caras, "La lista completa de ganadores de los premios Feroz 2017", "Juan Antonio Bayona's 'A Monster Calls' Leads Goya Award Nominations", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Smoke_%26_Mirrors_(2016_film)&oldid=969753113, Films directed by Alberto Rodríguez Librero, Articles containing Spanish-language text, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Daniel de Zayas, César Molina & José Antonio Manovel, This page was last edited on 27 July 2020, at 06:52. 10:23 AM PDT 9/19/2016 Sometimes, the effect is banal: for example, after one fetching scene in which Paesa inveigles himself into the affections of Roldan and Nieves by buying him some anniversary earrings to give to her, Jesus helpfully confirms that Paesa “knew more about people than they knew about themselves”.
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