FOREIGN FILM CONTENDERS
Life looks at a selection of entries from around the world at this year’s Oscars
Star Wars is colonising your waking life, so let me warp you to the neighbouring galaxy. The Oscar season is brewing, and one of the categories we’re always interested in — at least because it’s the only category that is about the world and not just about Hollywood — is the foreign language film. This year 81 countries submitted their films to the Academy. The long list will be announced in January, and the five finalists later in the month.
I’ve been impressed by some of the nominees (though I haven’t seen all). Here are some of the titles worth keeping an eye on — and hopefully some that will make it to the cinemas here.
Saul fia (Son Of Saul) HUNGARY
The most divisive film of the year, the directorial debut by Laszlo Nemes is a Holocaust thriller taking place in the slaughterhouse of Auschwitz. Saul (Géza Röhrig) is a member of the Sonderkommando, or Jewish prisoners forced to help the Nazis run the death camp. The film’s audacious, provocative formal style is to put the camera very close to Saul’s head, tune an extremely shallow focus, and blur out the barbarity in the background. You can’t take your eyes off the screen — and yet the debate continues whether the Holocaust is a material for such manipulative, video-game-style excitement. The film will open in Thailand in February.
En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron (A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting on Existence) SWEDEN
The final film in Roy Andersson’s human condition trilogy is droll, sad, deep, each shot meticulously composed, as in the director’s signature style, like a multi-layered painting. There’s no story — just vignettes, half-dreams, and two glum salesman going around selling joke toys in a town that seems to know no humour. Just the 10-minute scene of a present-day cafe being overrun by the cavaliers from the last century, with a mad king and courtiers, is enough of a cinematic marvel. The film is not likely to open here.
Ich seh, ich seh (Goodnight Mommy) AUSTRIA
Austria has sent a horror film to the Oscars, and that’s cool! Set in an austere, isolated villa by the lake, this minimal film has only three characters circling each other in that remote setting: twin boys and their mother, who just returned home from a facial surgery that left her head bandaged like a mummy. There’s no ghost or psychopath, but the wild imagination of the boys slowly takes a turn towards the dark.
Mustang FRANCE
France has submitted this beautiful drama that has nothing to do with France to the Oscars, a decision that says a lot about the internationalism of contemporary cinema (the film has been made with French investors and thus a French film). Mustang, which appears more like a Turkish film, is a sweet and soulful story of five Turkish sisters and their rebellion against the conservative society. The director, Deniz Gamze Erguven, is a Paris-based Turk, who’s influenced by both Sofia Coppola’s girls-on-pillow aesthetics as much as by Jane Austen. It would be insane if no Thai distributor imported this to our cinemas.
El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace Of The Serpent) COLOMBIA
Savage beauty and poetic mysticism — this blackand-white journey into the Amazonian depths is a rare treat from Columbia. Told through the diaries of two European explorers of the late 19th century, the film at first looks like romantic exotica, with the protagonist being a loin-clothed shaman who knows the secret of a mysterious jungle plant. But Embrace Of The Serpent presents a more complex relationship between the white men and the tribal people, between the nagging colonial guilt and the proud, ancient culture clinging to its survival.
Arabian Night Vol 2: The Desolate One PORTUGAL
Praise be to Portugal for sending this curve ball to the Academy. Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights (which was shown in Bangkok last month) is actually a three-part film, each running for two hours, a hard-hitting and yet fabulous fact-fiction hybrid that looks at the impact of Portugal’s economic woes. Instead of submitting the whole six-hour film, the Portuguese director chose the second part, the most eccentric and perhaps most heartfelt of the three, with a long section about poor apartment-dwellers trying to eke out a living during hard times.
El Clan (The Clan) ARGENTINA
Argentina likes to submit fun films to the Oscars; last year, they sent the crowd-pleasing black comedy Wild Tales, and this year they put forth Pablo Trapero’s The Clan, a based-on-truestory thriller about a family who makes a living kidnapping sons of rich politicians for ransom. Set in the 1980s, the film suggests that a military connection allows the Puccio family — an ordinary-looking household with bright children — to perpetrate a series of horrid crimes, including murder, blackmail, and locking up their screaming victims in the basement below their living room.
Muhammad: The Messenger of God IRAN
The Wahabi clerics are not happy with this, but Iran is proud of this biopic of the Islamic prophet set in 7th century Arabia. The film recounts the life of young Muhammad as well as his revolutionary adventure after he received the word of God. The director is Majid Majidi, known for his social realism films such as Children Of Heaven (a hit here in Bangkok back in the late 1990s). Let’s see how the (Christian) Academy will respond to this.
Nie yin niang (The Assassin) TAIWAN
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ravishing film frustrates a lot of people, and yet The Assassin should be understood as a formal study of heartbreak and integrity. The film (which was released in Thailand three months ago) excites art-house spectators with its lush palette — dripping fuchsia, infernal verdant and luxuriant red on the frame — while fans of martial art flicks are perplexed by its slow, deliberate pacing punctuated only by brief bursts of fighting. Shu Qi plays an assassin sent to kill a prince (Chang Chen) who was once betrothed to her. She hardly draws her dagger, but that’s not the point when the swirls of costume and colours make The Assassin a truly intriguing experience.
Men Who Saved the World MALAYSIA
This independent film by Liew Seng Tat is a satire whose target is Islamic superstition. A group of men is trying to move an old house from the forest into a village, but along the way, they believe the house is haunted by an “oily demon” — which turns out to be an African migrant running away from bullies. The film uses juvenile humour to comment on belief, prejudices and the tension between faith and modernity. The film was shown at World Film Festival of Bangkok last month.
How to Win At Checkers (Every Time) THAILAND
Thailand’s entry this year is a surprise to many. First of all, How To Win At Checkers (Every Time) was directed by a Korean-American, Josh Kim. Secondly, the film, which is at heart a comingof-age story of a boy in a small town, actually says a few unpleasant things about Thailand, chiefly the military drafting system that lends itself to bribery and favouritism, as well as a reference to the situation in the Deep South, and then the scene in a gaudy gay bar that may rattle ultra-moralists. To hope for its berth in the short list is a pretty long shot, but let’s say the film is perhaps our best shot in many years.