Hollywood famously loves movies about itself, to the point where satires about movie business are a minor subgenre by themselves. It's easy to see why - take your pick: narcissism, writing what you know, navel-gazing. But I can't, off the top of my head, think of any world-cinema analogues. I'm not counting stuff like... I dunno, Deerskin or One Shot of the Dead as they don't really aim at the same target.
That might be because there's no close analogue to Hollywood outside of Bollywood (do they do these satires?), but as Official Competition (an Argentine/Spanish co-production) shows, some of these tropes are universal - at least past a certain budget level.
Don Humberto (José Luis Gómez) is having an end-of-life crisis on the eve of his eightieth birthday. Trying to secure a legacy, he decides to bankroll the best movie, with the best story, the best actors, and the best director. What it's about... well, he doesn't care.
So his assistants scuttle to get the rights to an important literary novel, hire prestigious director Lola Cuevas (Penelope Cruz), and two of the best-rated actors available: Argentine Iván (Oscar Martinez), a pretentious method actor, and Félix (Antonio Banderas), a vapid blockbuster star.
Most of the movie takes place within the nine table readings Lola arranges to nail the characters down, almost all of them with just her two main actors. And trouble starts almost immediately.
Some of it stems from Lola's unorthodox acting exercises (such as making her two actors perform under a boulder suspended from a crane to make them nervous), but the lion's share comes from the immediate dislike and rivalry between the two leading men- with Lola, nuts as she is, as a sort of straight woman to their antics.
The dick-measuring contest calls to mind Alex De La Iglesia's Muertos de Risa*, but this is a far gentler film, its humor much less bleak as both Iván and Félix struggle to keep appearances up while still scoring passive-aggressive hits against each other.
It runs a bit overlong at almost two hours, but it's such an agreeable, funny and well-acted film that it's easy to forgive some bloat. Argentine directing duo Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat make do with mostly static shots, but they compensate by making the film very pretty to look at, with a few striking compositions (Cinematography: Arnau Valls Colomer; Art Direction: Sara Natividad). The script, by the directors plus Andrés Duprat, is a bit one-joke, but the joke is good and gets many different angles of attack.
I was turned to this by Nada, a TV series directed by the same team. This is a very different beast - more of a straight comedy, if nothing else, but just as likeable.
Some of the specifics here might get lost in translation (a Spaniard vs Argentine insult match might be the biggest casualty), but it still traffics in pretty universal humor, and could slot into the Hollywood satire subgenre as one of the better entries without difficulties.
*: Highly recommended, too.
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