Spanish stars Cruz, Bardem play strained on-screen couple in new film

A tech billionaire’s secret survival bunker inspired Florian Zeller’s latest film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, providing a warning about isolation, power and a world controlled by a wealthy few. Starring real-life husband-and-wife team Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, “Bunker” follows a renowned architect who is asked to design a luxury shelter in Hawaii for a wealthy client convinced that society is set to implode.

As the architect becomes increasingly seduced by the project, tensions emerge in his marriage and a seemingly minor dispute with a neighbour becomes increasingly ominous. Zeller, who won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for “The Father” in 2021, said the idea came from reports he read about a prominent entrepreneur building a secret hideaway.

“I thought it was a fascinating paradox because this man, who made a fortune based on the idea of connecting people together, was working on a Plan B to isolate himself from the rest of the world,” the French director told reporters.

The story evolved into a broader reflection on a society where people increasingly isolate themselves and where everything from food to friendship is delivered via screens. “The more I was thinking about it, the more I realised that all of us, to some degree, are tempted to live in a bunker,” he said. “Not a real bunker, of course, but an invisible bunker.” The film also serves as a critique of an economic system in which a handful of people exert enormous influence, Zeller said. “Very few people own almost everything. They own our privacy, they own our email addresses, they own the platforms on which we communicate. And that’s a real issue that we have to question.”

Zeller said casting Bardem and Cruz together added another dimension to the story. “I thought it would be a unique way to capture something special as a real couple, to blur the line between reality and fiction,” he said.

Cruz told reporters that she was drawn to the project partly because it explored her own concerns. “I believe that the people making the biggest decisions in the world can probably be counted on the fingers of two hands, and sometimes even one hand would be enough,” she said.

“That degree of manipulation seems very sad to me, and events are moving so fast that it feels as though there is hardly any time to react.” Bardem said he had brought nothing from his own marriage to Cruz into the film. However, his wife acknowledged one thing – that the movie had allowed them to speak together in Spanish, as they do in real life, while swapping to English for their relations with the outside world.

“Even if you look back 10, 15 years ago, it was always so challenging to get financiers to accept something like that,” she said. “But ... this is what kids grow up (being) used to now, seeing original films with people speaking the language they are supposed to speak.”

Reuters