Pablo Escobar, “loving Pablo"

Hello today we are presenting to you the biopic of Pablo Escobar, “loving Pablo”.

But first, who is Pablo Escobar? Pablo Emilio Escobar was a Colombian cocaine trafficker. At the head of the Medellín cartel, he was one of the main drug barons in the 1980s. His cartel supplied approximately 80% of the cocaine consumed in the United States, for a figure annual turnover of 21.9 billion US dollars. Often called "the king of cocaine", he is the richest criminal in history.

So, about the film, Escobar, or Loving Pablo is a Spanish film directed by Fernando León de Aranoa, released in 2017. It is an adaptation of the autobiography “Amando a Pablo, odiando a Escobar” by Virginia Vallejo, a journalist who had an affair with Pablo Escobar. The film retraces their first meeting, when the drug lord is on an irresistible rise and builds his cartel, until the latter's fall. We know it’s a biopic, because as we said, the movie is based on the autobiography of Virginia Vallejo in which she recounts her love story with Pablo Escobar, of whom she was the mistress between 1983 and 1987, as well as the rise to power of the South American cartels. So, it is a faithful biopic of Escobar’s life with his wife, cartel, and death.

The main actor, Javier Bardem, played the role of Escobar, and is representing him quite good. First, physically of course. Javier Bardem is Spanish, and says that “For twenty years, each time there was Escobar in a film, I was offered the role”. When he finally accepted, he even decided to gain some weight by drinking some beer and eat pastas to be even more faithful.

Then, he represented Escobar by his mimics, his expressions, and his personality. For that, Javier Bardem say that he watched a lot of interrogations, documents and articles describing Escobar, and he even forced himself not to watch other Escobar series, such as Narcos, to not be influenced. He wanted his own version of Escobar, to show more a human being who lived in the misery and a corrupt government, than a glamorous icon. Finally, he had to completely get into the character and understand his motivations to play him. Javier Bardem’s wife explains that he sometimes frightened her after a scene, and even him wanted to leave the character of Escobar as soon as he heard “cut !”.

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