Las Fantasmas de Goya

Hola mis amores!
Luckily for you, I have to spend ALL my free time at the computer lab working on two papers and a presentation...whoever said studying abroad was easy LIED (actually...no they didn´t...this is pretty much the only assignments I´ve had).
SO I´m going to enthrall you all with a horrible story about a movie I recently saw. If you don´t want to know the plot, don´t read this entry, because I plan on describing it in great detail. I´ll tell more stories later, so skip down if you don´t want to know.
But basically, this movie is called Las Fantasmas de Goya, or in English, Goya´s Ghosts. For those of you who don´t know, Goya is an incredibly famous, incredibly incredible Spanish artist, who painted during the Inquisition and during the French invasion of Spain (don´t I sound smart?). So naturally, I thought that this would be about his life, because everyone knows that Goya went a little nuts during the last few years of his life, creating his "dark period".
Unfortunately, that is not what this movie is about. It was basically about Spain, which is good, but it focused a lot of attention on Natalie Portman´s character, who is the daughter of a friend of Goya (he paints her picture...but they never fall in love or anything). Well, she goes out to dinner one night and turns down roast pig, cause she doesn´t like it, which I totally understand. Then the inquisition guys get her, because she must be Jewish if she won´t eat pork. So she´s tortured, quite graphically if you ask me, and sent to jail, her family tries and fails to intervine. Meanwhile, there´s a priest who falls in love with her and tries to help her but can´t, and eventually has to leave Spain. So Goya watches as the French invade, blah, blah, blah, and the prisoners of the Inquisition are freed. Now, 15 years have passed while Natalie has been in jail. She comes out all pale, with her hair in total dissaray, all cut horribly (and decides not to wash it for the rest of the movie), her jaw´s been broken so her face looks all funny, she´s skinny, she´s in rags, and her feet are bare and bloody. She has cuts and bruises all over her body. So she goes to her house, she has no clue what´s going on in Spain, cause she just spent the last 15 years being tortured. She goes to her house and finds her family dead, so she goes to Goya´s house. We find Goya deaf, but she manages to relay to him that her family is dead, and now the only thing that matters is her daughter. Yes, because apparently she had a daughter with the priest while imprisoned and she wants to find her. Of course, the priest is now back in Spain, and he now has a French family, with three kids and a wife (how fickle). So Goya takes her to him, not knowing that this guy, Lorenzo is the father, and she goes nuts, saying that now they can be together with their baby.
So Lorenzo sends her to an insane aslyum.
Meanwhile, Goya finds her daughter, who is now 15 and a prostitute, but looks exactly like her mother. He goes to the insane aslyum and buys Natalie (whose name is Inés) so that she can meet her daughter. OF course, she´s completely insane by now (who wouldn´t be?) and goes around with a pillow in her shirt pretending to be pregnant. So he buys her anyway and takes her to the place where her daughter is...to be more specific, the pub where her daughter is trying to get some dinero. But right when he gets there, the police come and arrest all the hookers, including her daughter, and take them away to go to the Americas. Goya tries to chase her daughter but is unsuccessful...meanwhile, Inés goes inside, where she finds the baby of a prostitute and thinks it´s her baby from before, so she takes it and carries it around for the rest of the movie.
Then the British invade, so the French are out and once again Lorenzo is in trouble. His family flees, but he is captured, and the Inquisition men, who were in prison and are now free, condemn him to death for all his sins (he has the choice to repent but chooses not to). So he´s killed in a public execution, which is also quite graphic, and his daughter, who is now the mistress of an Englishman, unknowingly watches her father die. Meanwhile, Inés comes to the town square where she sees him and decides to say hi. So right before he dies, she holds up the baby and yells his name and then smiles at him. then they kill him, and he´s taken out of town on one of those carriages (remember in MOnty Python, bring out yer dead? it´s kind of like that).
So the last scene is his body being rolled out of the city, and there´s little kids dancing around singing, cause that´s how public executions were in those days, good, old fashioned fun. And then the scene expands and we see that Inés is walking next to the carriage, holding his dead hand and still carrying the baby. Goya comes up behind them and yells her name and she turns around and gives him a big grin.
So that´s the movie I saw on Friday.
I´ve never been more disturbed in my entire life.
Then on Saturday, I went to a free concert near my house...it was classical music and it was really good. I miss concerts...it actually made me want to play the bassoon again. Then I did a lot of homework until going out again for tapas.
On Sunday, I hit up the Rastro again and bought presents for all of you, so now you have to be nice to me, right? Haha...
Ok well...I better get started on my presentation, as it´s due Friday...I really miss my computer. But Lauren lent me a memory stick, so now I feel a little bit more comfortable. Oh well...
¡¡¡¡Muchos besos!!!!