And the nominees are...
A rundown of the movies up for Best International Feature Film at Sunday's Oscars.
On Sunday night, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will award a trophy to what it considers the Best International Feature Film of 2022. Since this newsletter is, more or less, about international film history, it seemed appropriate to spend this week’s post running through the list of nominees. Any category at the Oscars will always offer something to gripe about it, and this is no exception. Why didn’t India submit the globally-beloved historical joyride RRR for consideration? How was it that Decision to Leave, this year’s installment of the Korean cinematic renaissance, didn’t make it off the shortlist? And when countries like Iran will inevitably refuse to submit dissident masterpieces like Jafar Panahi’s No Bears, isn’t the category kind of a joke? All good questions! But the Academy Awards still provide a rare chance for international movies to grab the attention of American audiences, and while some of this year’s nominees are better than others, all are worth a look.
So without further ado…
All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues)
Country: Germany 🇩🇪
Where to find it: Streaming on Netflix
I spent the totality of last week’s newsletter flipping out at the bad faith criticism that Edward Berger’s World War I epic is a piece of pro-German propaganda. Unless you also get paid for your mind-meltingly dumb contrarian takes, then I trust you won’t emerge from two-and-a-half hours of teenagers dying senselessly in the mud thinking “what a love letter to nationalism!” As brutal as they can be, those two-and-a-half hours are worth it. It’s not a film without weaknesses—by toggling back and forth between the grunts at the front and the German High Command, All Quiet doesn’t dedicate as much space as it could to defining Paul Bäumer and his friends as fully realized characters. In a way, though, it doesn’t have to. Felix Kammerer’s Paul is nobody in particular—a Jedermann who, like millions of others, was swept up by a Boschian tornado of mechanized death. And you don’t need a backstory to understand the blank numbness on Paul’s face as he realizes that he’ll have to face death one more time to satisfy a general’s pride.
All Quiet fits firmly in a lineage of “war is hell” cinema, dating at least as far back as Hollywood’s 1930 take on Remarque’s novel and, over in Germany, G.W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918. The film isn’t saying anything you haven’t heard before, but few movies have been as adept at translating the human terror of staring up at a tank as it rolls over your trench or watching a friend drop to his knees to futilely plead for his life. Yeah, we all already know “war is hell,” but we usually know it as a platitude, an abstraction. With conflicts continuing to rage in Ukraine, Ethiopia, and elsewhere, it can be useful to remind yourself how literal that hell is for the people living in it.
Line to drop at your Oscars party: “Did you read the stupid fucking takes in The Guardian or The Wall Street Journal trying to make All Quiet seem like some kind of Völkisch paean to nationalism? I can’t tell if they’re clueless about film, about German history, or about literally everything!”
If you like All Quiet: I’ve already mentioned the original All Quiet and Westfront 1918, so let’s go with Roberto Rosselini’s Rome, Open City. An OG of the neorealist movement, this 1945 drama of Italian resistance to German occupation was filmed in the literal wreckage of World War II and shares Berger’s unsparing approach to wartime violence.
Argentina, 1985
Country: Laos 🇱🇦 (jk jk, you guessed right 🇦🇷🇦🇷🇦🇷)
Where to find it: Streaming on Prime
“Buoyant” is a weird adjective for a film about the prosecution of the neofascists responsible the kidnap, torture, and murder of Argentina’s desaparecidos, but it fits Santiago Mitre’s courtroom drama surprisingly well. Striking a Sorkin-esque balance between wry humor and earnest outrage, Argentina, 1985 is held together by Ricardo Darín’s performance as chief prosecutor Julio César Strassera. As he prepares for what he calls the most important trial since Nuremberg, Strassera exudes a low-key gruff charisma while coping with threats against his family, guilt over his own complicity during the dictatorship, and, of course, the masterminds of the previous regime’s barbarity. For the most part, the film deftly handles its shifts it tone. The comedy of Strassera’s relationships with his neophyte staff doesn’t undercut the power of the testimony from the victims of the junta. Occasionally, though, Mitre strains for emotional heights that he doesn’t quite reach. The depiction of Strassera’s closing statement, for example, feels ripped from the climax of a hundred other fight-the-system stories. Argentina, 1985 is, ultimately, a formulaic film, but it’s so light on its feet that it manages to stay entertaining throughout. And, for parochial Americans like me, it’s an opportunity to spend a couple hours in a time and place that you really ought to know more about.
Line to drop at your Oscars party: “Darín’s fantastic, but have you seen The Secret in Their Eyes? Wouldn’t it be wild if he carries Argentina to another Oscar for another Junta-era legal drama?”
If you like Argentina, 1985: Costa-Gavra’s 1969 film Z also tells the story of a courageous magistrate taking on powerful right-wing thugs, this time in Greece. It’s the rare political thriller that manages to be genuinely thrilling. And relevant to this week’s newsletter, it was also the first ever film to be nominated for the Oscars for both Best Foreign Language Film (which it won) and Best Picture (which it didn’t).
Close
Country: Belgium 🇧🇪
Where to find it: In theaters and available to buy on Amazon, YouTube, etc.
Holy shit is this movie good. Given the subject matter of The Haunted Screen podcast’s first season, All Quiet seems the obvious choice for my favorite nominee, but my heart is with Lukas Dhont’s coming-of-age drama. It tells the story of Léo and Rémi, 13-year-old best friends whose profound bond starts to crack under the pressure of high school homophobia. The film is ambiguous about whether either or both of the boys is gay. In fact, it’s their classmates’ insistence that they define their relationship that drives a wedge between them. All the taunts and whispers cause Léo to pull away, leaving the sensitive Rémi hurt and confused. Close is one of the most authentic depictions of male intimacy I’ve ever seen on screen. It documents the hunger that boys (and men) have to love one another and the cruelty with which they force each other to keep that hunger unsated. Both Eden Dambrine and Gustv De Waele give astonishing debut performances, but it’s Dambrine’s Léo, his emotions barely hidden under a patina of fresh masculinity, who anchors the film. (Honestly, if we lived in a just world, there’s a Best Actor nominee or two whose slot he would’ve taken.) Cinematographer Frank van den Eeden deserves special recognition as well. The opening image of the boys running through the flower fields of Rémi’s family’s farm is a stunner—and one that eloquently shows the unselfconscious joy that adolescence is about to take from them.
Line to drop at your Oscars party: “If Everything Everywhere wins Best Picture and Close wins Best International Feature, does that mean A24 has finally achieved cinematic world domination?”
If you like Close: Though the setting and story is very different, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali also contains beautifully naturalistic performances from its young leads Pinaki Sengupta and Uma Dasgupta. Pather is the first entry in Ray’s Apu Trilogy, which almost single-handedly defined India’s Parallel Cinema movement in the 1950s. Its sequel, Aparajito, is a good pairing with Close, too, as both offer heartbreakingly honest portrayals of youth and grief.
EO
Country: Poland 🇵🇱
Where to find it: Streaming on the Criterion Channel and available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
In Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, we travel with the eponymous donkey on an odyssey from Poland to Italy as he tries to reunite with the one person he trusts, his old circus partner Kassandra. Breaking with the template for animal-centered movies, EO brays rather than speaks. This is no fairytale, though its tone often evokes the primal anxieties plumbed by the Brothers Grimm. (When your protagonist is a piece of domesticated livestock, the Hansel and Gretel story seems particularly resonant.) Even as EO encounters a number of humans along the way, there is relatively little dialogue. Skolimowski instead opts to tell his story through dynamic visuals, some of which work better than others. The film is most effective when it stays close to the animal at its heart—as when see the world through EO’s blurry eyes—and falters in its more gratuitously experimental sequences. There’s a recurring motif of images shown through blood red filters—an aerial shot of a landscape here, a robotic dog there—that I found beautiful but baffling. These l’art pour l’art moments interrupt the film’s potent emotional throughline, forcing you out of EO’s very flesh-and-fur world into a vantage point that’s jarringly abstract. Such touches feel removed from the picaresque string of adventures, where we encounter humanity’s kindness and, more often, its cruelty. And that cruelty, directed at both EO and the people he meets, can make this a trying watch. At times, the film feels borderline misanthropic, though given how we treat the animals we share the world with, why should we expect a story from a donkey’s perspective to be otherwise?
Line to drop at your Oscars party: “You have to admire Skolimowski’s audacity. Attempting a remake of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar is a bold move, but EO manages to stand on its own.”
If you like EO: The 1966 Bresson movie that inspired it seems the obvious choice, but it’s a blindspot for me, and despite Godard’s assurance that “everyone who sees this film will be absolutely astonished,” I won’t recommend it sight unseen. I was tempted to suggest the Japanese children’s classic The Adventures of Milo and Otis in honor of Rotini the pug (see below!), but especially given the brutality EO experiences, it seemed in poor taste to put forward a film with a legendary animal body count. So I’m going with Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, an animated epic that is much more fantastical than EO, but shares its fascination with the wonder and otherness of the non-human world.
The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin)
Country: Ireland 🇮🇪
Where to find it: Only in theaters
You don’t expect a movie from Ireland to show up in an Oscar category that requires the dialogue be primarily in a language other than English, but Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl is a reminder that Irish is a living language. Set in 1981, the film follows nine-year-old Cáit as she’s sent to spend a summer with relatives as her overwhelmed mother and bastard of a father navigate their sixth pregnancy. The distant cousins that take her in are strangers to Cáit, but the maternal Eibhlín quickly becomes the loving parent that the girl so desperately needs. For reasons that emerge as the plot unfolds, Seán is slower to warm up to the role of surrogate father, but through farm work and footraces, he and Cáit begin to heal each other’s emotional wounds. As the title suggests, this is a quiet film, one that’s sweet without being cloying. The gentleness that the three lead characters bring out of each other is affecting precisely because it stands in contrast with harshness they’ve all experienced beyond the walls of their simple farmhouse. Subdued domestic dramas aren’t usually my thing. (Exhibit A: My affection for the lurid excess of Italian giallo.) But for a story that could’ve so easily veered into the saccharine, The Quiet Girl possesses an unfeigned humanity that makes it worth watching.
Line to drop at your Oscars party: “It’s been so exciting to watch Irish language film come of age, hasn’t it? First Black ‘47, now The Quiet Girl—we’ve come a long way from George Morrison’s Mise Éire!”
If you like The Quiet Girl: Also up for an Oscar this year in the Best Live Action Short category, Italy’s Le pupille also centers on a neglected young girl looking for love outside of the family she was born into. The nuns at Serafina’s World War II-era Catholic orphanage are often cruel, but both the heroine and the visually inventive film understand that mischief can be a tool for survival.