Review: Official Competition stars Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas in a satire of the movie world

The only other patron at the Dendy morning session for this subtitled Spanish-Argentine film was singing its praises to the usher as I walked out. I could understand her enthusiasm: despite a slightly complicated set-up, it's a beautifully acted, often darkly funny satire about the pretensions, rivalries and ruthlessness of the film industry.

Humberto Suarez (José Luis Gomez), self-made multimillionaire and philanthropist, has just turned 80 and is fretting about his legacy.

Instead of building a bridge, he decides to produce a great film. To that end, he purchases at great expense the rights to a Nobel Prize-winning novel and hires renowned writer-director Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz) to adapt and shoot it. He doesn't bother to read it but gets Lola to tell him (and us) the story, about the fraught relationship between two brothers.

International movie star Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas) and radical theatre actor Ivan Torres (Oscar Martinez) - both legends in their fields - are also recruited to play the leads.

This isn't a film about shooting a film: most of it is concerned with the rehearsal process of the two stars and the writer-director and the methods, manipulation and mind games this involves. And, of course, there's a meta aspect to it too, watching actors play actors and a director in the process of developing a film within a film and evoking their own established screen careers and personalities and the nature of the industry in which they work.

Since it's not about the making of the movie, this feels like a chamber piece, much of it simply the three actors in various spaces talking and rehearsing (a good way to save money). If you're up for a performance-based piece, however, it's never boring. There are some visual flourishes too - in one scene Banderas's face looms large behind him as he talks while on camera.

Some of what ensues might be expected. Felix and Ivan, both with well-developed egos, circle each other warily and argue over issues such as High Art versus Popular Art, differing methods of preparation and approaches to the acting profession while at times also professional mutual respect and admiration.

Meanwhile, Lola plays the part of tortured and exacting Artiste, making the actors repeat a line over and over, often with little or no guidance, until they get it just right. It's the sort of thing William Wyler (Ben-Hur, The Best Years of Our Lives, Jezebel) did: his painstaking and sometimes cryptic method frustrated many actors but he directed more of them to Oscar wins than anyone.

A few of Lola's directorial choices seem a little more unorthodox, like making the actors sit under a large rock suspended from a crane to capture the emotion of one scene.

I did pretty much guess what was coming at the end before it happened but it still worked.

Co-directors Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat have collaborated on other films (including The Man Next Door) and co-scripted Official Competition with Andres Duprat. Although it's in Spanish, there's nothing terribly esoteric about this film. If you're at all interested in movies about movies and aren't put off by reading subtitles, this is well worth seeing. Hollywood's made its share of fine films about itself - Sunset Blvd., Singin' in the Rain and The Player, to name three, but Official Competition suggests the European film world can be just as ego-ridden, hypocritical and ruthless as its American counterpart - and just as good at recognising this.