Nikita Mikhalkov? Denys Arcand? Giuseppe Tornatore??! Excuse us for thinking we just woke up on the eve of the presidency of that other Clinton, but we’re feeling, uh, nostalgic, upon today’s announced narrowing of the eligible films for Oscar’s Best Foreign-Language Film—or, as it’s more commonly known, Best Movie Picked From a Random Group of Movies from Some Countries Seen By a Handful of People in a Room Somewhere. The wonderfully alarmist Scott Foundas has certainly said it better than we ever could, but we will say that though the preference evidenced today by that mysteriously appointed foreign film committee for the palatable middlebrow wasn’t surprising, it was as disheartening as ever.
As usual, the film has to be appointed by its country to be eligible (one imagines Kim Jong-Il sitting down with his cabinet, stroking his chin to decide whether to sumbit A Schoolgirl’s Diary or Lazy Cat Dinga for nomination), and among the arbitrary rules, only one film per country, and it can’t be an international coproduction (tsk tsk, Kieslowski!). It continued today, when the Academy announced the final nine, which did admittedly contain a couple films of interest, including the widely unseen latest from Andrzej Wajda and the Israeli film Beaufort (strong filmmaking there, but piffle compared to some of the great artistry on display elsewhere), but mostly was a stirring reminder of the ridiculous votes made in the past decade, in favor of Holocaust inspirationals, Italian twee, and coming-of-age pablum. We shouldn’t have hoped for much more, but complete slaps in the face to 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Persepolis, Silent Light, Secret Sunshine, all of them extraordinary in one way or another, amounts to a full-scale idiocy. And it must be reiterated, these films didn’t even make it to the final round, while self-parodic titles such as The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (not to be confused with When Father Was Away on Business, Kusturica’s nominee from 1988) squeaked in for another level of what I’m sure will be distinguished discernment.
I mean, seriously, listen to this from the official press release:
The Phase I committee, consisting of several hundred Los Angeles-based members, screened the 63 eligible films and their ballots determined the above shortlist.
A Phase II committee, made up of ten randomly selected members from the Phase I group, joined by specially invited ten-member contingents in New York and Los Angeles, will view the shortlisted films and select the five nominees for the category.
Phase II screenings will take place from Friday, January 18, through Sunday,January 20, in both Hollywood and New York City.
Have your eyes crossed yet? What does it matter? Nothing really, they’re Oscars, right? Well, for little-seen foreign films, it means a hell of a lot of recognition that most subtitled movies don’t get outside of cinephile circles, and more of a chance at an audience. And a film like Cristian Mungiu’s masterwork needs that recognition, especially in a marketplace flooded with so many films that success borders on the miraculous.
Despite the tortured self-analysis some critics feel the need to use as ostensibly humbling preface for their top tens, at Reverse Shot we’re thankful for best-of-year round-ups—we savor any chance we get to reiterate our love for films that might not have had the benefit of a massive marketing team behind them. Pitting the year’s best films against one another in a top-ten list may seem like an arbitrary comparison of national cinemas, moods, genres, and political statements, but it doesn’t necessarily invalidate the act.
Critics have been singling out for praise something that has come to be known as The Shot in Atonement—in which director Joe Wright surveys WWII’s Dunkirk evacuation (when more than 300,000 British and French soldiers were rescued from German attack) as a lengthy, five-minute-plus single take—and no surprise there: it sticks out like a sore thumb. A film ostensibly about multiple perspectives, Atonement is edited and stylized to a not-nauseating-but-still-vaguely-insulting degree—gratuitously lit interiors, self-consciously arch framing of characters, attenuated sequences of crosscutting. Whenever there’s a point to be made, Wright makes it ten times over, until there’s no doubt that the audience…really…gets…it. So, the already celebrated Dunkirk single take, in which James McAvoy’s wounded soldier solemnly wanders throughout a richly color-drained tableau of well-manicured dread, seems completely aesthetically opposed to the rest of the film.
Because the visual strategy is so foregrounded, the entire sequence exudes an undeniable whiff of “look at me” stunt making. Wright seems to care much less about the mess of war and the stench of death than the ability of the camera to drift through and, more importantly, above it. He choreographs the thing like it’s on a very predetermined roller coaster track. Conveniently placed miseries abound as McAvoy’s tourist and audience surrogate watches the chaos unfold on the beach: horses are shot through the head and fall to the ground, men drunkenly cavort on a destroyed merry-go-round, a chorus of solemn, prideful soldiers sing along in harmony with the score, and in the distance a gloriously hazy Ferris wheel looms like death itself (I didn’t notice, but after the film, a friend told me a silhouetted figure was hanging off of it, flailing spastically—a world spun out of control indeed).
Of course, Wright’s ultra-aestheticized approach to his Big War Sequence shouldn’t surprise, since earlier in the film he tracks out from McAvoy’s speechless countenance to take in the horror of a country field littered with the bodies of sweet-faced school girls shot discreetly in the forehead (for sheer beauty, it’s the most bald-facedly gorgeous vision of violent wartime death in a “serious” film since Benigni lit a pile of concentration camp corpses as though it were a shimmering Christmas tree.) It’s unfair to morally prize one aesthetic approach over another (of course, Spielberg’s in-your-face vérité reinvention of cinematic warmaking in Saving Private Ryan was as overly strategized as any of Wright’s well-composed frames), but Wright’s grandstanding in this sequence bespeaks of a decidedly disjointed approach, as well as disappoints after his gloriously measured 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which smartly employed the long take as a coherent, unifying device. Atonement’s generally muddled storytelling may be the film’s biggest failing (the central conceit is far too literary to truly adapt to the screen), but the tonally awkward Dunkirk moment, which admits a great deal of self-satisfaction in its design, shows how desperately, awkwardly this hollow tale is reaching, grasping for a soul.
Kaycee Moore (above) was thrilled when she heard Killer of Sheep was Time Magazine’s third best movie of 2007.
From Richard Corliss’s top 10 of 2007 in Time:
#3. Killer of Sheep
Completed in 1977 and virtually unseen since…. As the children play games in the post-apocalyptic rubble of Watts, the man’s emotional exhaustion abrades against the woman’s sexual yearning. This is surely the finest, most uncompromising film by a black director.
That’s right: the “finest film…by a black director” (note: NOT “black American”) is the third best movie of the year behind No Country for Old Men and The Lives of Others. Sorry Spike Lee and Ousmane Sembene, you’ve made some good movies, but nothing quite as good as The Lives of Others.
When I first read that Edward Yang, the Taiwanese director of Yi Yi (A One and a Two) and A Brighter Summer Day, had passed away this weekend at the age of 59, I was selfishly upset—as a moviegoer, I was angry that an artist of Yang’s talent and stature should die at such a young age, taking with him the many movies he had yet to make. Most of Yang’s films are difficult to see in this country, and my one hope today is that his death will result in their wider availability. It’s small solace that, though we won’t get new films, there are still so many Yang films for most of us to discover beyond Yi Yi, the one Yang film available on DVD here (on a fantastic new Criterion disc).
Yi Yi became something of an international sensation earlier in the decade, winning Yang the best director prize at Cannes in 2000 and a best picture award from the National Society of Film Critics the following year, cementing Yang’s status as one of the greatest and most important figures in world cinema. No one would have guessed that Yi Yi would end up being Yang’s final film (he was working on an animated feature at the time of his death), but in hindsight, it’s a fitting close to his career. A film of breathtaking intimacy and sweep, Yi Yi is a small family drama—it opens with a wedding; it features a birth at its midpoint; it ends with a funeral—that, in its quietly beautiful, unassuming way, seems to capture the essence of human life as it’s lived: the wonder of childhood, the thrill of first love, the desperate loneliness of the city, the frustration of missed opportunity, the sting of lost love, the grace of old age. Almost every shot of the movie is like a work of art—the astonishing loveliness of Yang’s long-shot, long-take compositions can’t be put into words. I can’t write about Yi Yi without recourse to overused superlatives—it is, indeed, sublime, a masterpiece in every sense of the word, one of three or four great masterworks of this decade. It’s a film that moves me to tears. Warm and funny, enveloping and sad, Yi Yi is a film I’ll always treasure, and for that, I’m incredibly grateful.
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