Filmed in 2008/9, Mascares (or 'Masks' in English if you prefer) begins at the theatre in the northern Spanish city of San Sebastian as the cast take their curtain call on the closing night of Edward Albee’s “La Cabra” (“The Goat”). The lead, Martin, an architect who falls in love with a goat, is the acclaimed Spanish actor Josep Maria Pou whom we are about to follow on a journey into the heart and mind of one of the all-time greats of stage and screen.
Pou has been chosen to play the lead in “Su seguro servidor, Orson Welles”, the Spanish version of Richard France’s “Obediently Yours, Orson Welles” which had premiered in Paris in 2006. We are introduced to Pou, an amiable giant of a man in his mid-sixties, as he wanders the streets of Barcelona reciting lines from the play to himself. This is his preferred technique for learning lines and it has, on occasion, had comic consequences: once, in a taxi, Pou was reciting some lines from “King Lear” resulting in the driver, whom the actor had assumed could not hear him, stopping the vehicle in terror!
France’s play is set in 1985 on the day after Welles’ 70th (and final) birthday and we learn that Pou was picked for bringing to the role a combination of gravitas, an understanding of commitment and struggle, and (above all) great personal charm. As rehearsals get under way we see the toing-and-froing between Pou and director Esteve Riambau as they seek to get the script exactly right. To Pou, words transform into little shapes that float around and have to be exactly the right size to reach the audience.
As what we might call a “fly-on-the-wall” documentary (co-director Elisabet Cabeza prefers the term “guerrilla film-making”), Masks gives us some quite unguarded insights into the stages through which a great actor passes in the process of becoming the character. One thing that surprised – and rather moved – me was the admission of such a decorated and accomplished actor that he still has a real terror of the nakedness and exposure of his creation in front of an audience; he manages this by planning meticulously for every eventuality in order to go on in what he describes as a “state of security”. One of Pou’s funnier secrets is that, whilst he can generally do English accents, he can’t do Gielgud without sounding more like Stan Laurel!
90% of the audience don’t know, Pou tells us, that Orson Welles was a brilliant stage magician, something he’d wanted to be since meeting his father’s friend Harry Houdini in Chicago at the age of six. As the play contains flashbacks to Welles’ earlier career, Pou must learn to do the tricks himself. We see something of the hours he devotes to doing so though, importantly, without learning exactly how they work.
The theme of “magic versus trickery” was important to Welles. He noted that when a magician performs a trick on stage the audience asks, “how did he do that?” whilst its response to a trick on screen would be, “how did THEY do that?”. Thus Welles identifies movies with trickery and hoaxes, but the theatre with magic.
As Pou’s transformation progresses, his already substantial frame is padded out to match that of the great bon viveur and he adopts his lop-sided gait. There is much agonising over whether or not Pou should wear a wig: if you want to know, watch the film!
The final rehearsals arrive and we see Pou as Welles, by now an almost-anonymous actor doing voiceover work for dog food and laxative advertisements while he awaits a call from Stephen Spielberg about potential funding for his “Don Quixote”. Welles detested what he termed “commercial work” and Pou has clearly captured this aspect of his personality.
Masks gives us a fascinating insight into the creative process and the goings-on behind the scenes of a major theatre production. There is enough here for an experienced thespian to learn from, but it is accessible to anyone with a love of theatre. Complemented by Eduard Arbide’s soundtrack (I found this a bit intrusive at first but it grew on me as the film progressed), it is shot in such a way as to give us an appreciation for some of the technical aspects of theatre without in any way losing that magic which Welles so cherished. It is a trilingual production, in Catalan, Spanish and English. It is subtitled in English but, as is inevitable, some nuances are lost, particularly from conversations in Catalan between the creatives.
The finishing touch to any performance, Pou explains, is the reaction of the audience which through gasps, laughter and applause adds its own soundtrack. Pretty much everyone who reads this must be yearning for the day when we can, once again, go back to the theatre and make our own contribution to that soundtrack. Until then, Elisabet Cabeza suggests in the interview which accompanies the film, Masks invites us to do as Pou does and invest time and effort into putting ourselves in others’ shoes, the better to understand how they are feeling in these difficult times.
Reviewer - Ian Simpson
on - 11/5/20
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