I've Loved You So Long

Foreign films leave American audiences cold at least in part to their failure to be BIG. They are often quiet little stories about astonishingly unglamorous people, doing ordinary things... like living. This is, of course, the very reason that I enjoy them. I adore a little movie about some regular folks getting by; especially if it gives me a sort of illicit peek into the way someone else manages to do that. If I have to read subtitles to do that, well, so be it.

I've Loved You So Long is a quiet little movie about a quiet woman quietly bearing a terrible secret and a whole lot of pain. It opens as Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) returns to the land of the living after 15 years in prison. She is met by her much younger sister Lea (Elysa Zylberstein)who generously opens her home even though the two women are virtually strangers. Juliette is a sphinx who slowly warms to the new people in her life - her little nieces, her guarded brother-in-law, his silent father. The everyday challenges of life are made harder by the question of her crime - finding a job, dealing with social workers and parole officers - but the harder call is how to rebuild the relationship with her sister.

Kristin Scott Thomas is a fabulous actress in any language. Her eyes say so much despite Juliette's lack of dialogue; the cracks in her armor showing on that expressive face. I'll let it slip that this movie lacks the traditional "it will get worse" storyline and lets Juliette move back into life without any spectacular crisis. But that's what makes it moving. Quietly so. See the website here.

Fugitive Pieces

It is the rare film that stays with you. You know what I mean. The type of thing that haunts your head with images and words that linger and slide past your defenses; snapshots that stick around and crop up in unexpected places. Fugitive Pieces is such a film, so lyrical and lovely and ripe with human experience that I found myself thinking of it as poetry. This is my favorite type of film - one that takes you to another facet of our humanity - and takes you there with all your senses.

Told largely in the fragmentary flashbacks of memory, this is the story of Jakob (Stephen Dillane)who at seven years old watches in terror as his parents are murdered by Nazis in occupied Poland. Jakob escapes to the woods where he is rescued by Athos (Rade Serbedzija)who successfully smuggles him out of Poland to Greece. Jakob is haunted by images of his sister being dragged away, but the war comes to an end and Athos packs them off to live in Canada - far from memories. Despite the love and dedication of his 'godfather' Jakob grows into a brilliant writer but a deeply lonely man as "living with ghosts requires solitude." But through the love of friends, themselves all in some ways victims of the war, Jakob finally makes peace with his ghosts and learns to love, and live, again.

Jeremy Podeswa delivers a masterful adaptation of Anne Michael's novel - beautifully framed and lovingly filmed. The acting is superb and subtle as well; I was particularly smitten with Serbedzija and his expressive eyes. This lovely film may well break your heart, but it demonstrates the ever remarkable ability of the human heart to heal. See more here.

The Counterfeiters

What I enjoy about foreign films is usually based on how different they are from our domestic product. Films that are made not only in a language other than English, but also in a context other than the American worldview, are a completely refreshing window into the larger world. From that point of view, The Counterfeiters is a bit of a disappointment. Other than language, this Austrian film could have been made on a Hollywood sound set - with production values, writing, and acting that is definitely on a par with anything made in the US. And, sadly, this is the film that beat out Pan's Labyrinth for the best foreign language film of 2007.

The film is based loosely on on the memoirs of Adolf Burger and his participation in Operation Bernhard - the Nazi plan to destabilize the Allied war effort by flooding the UK and US economies with counterfeited cash. Life in the special barracks at Sachsenhausen is luxurious for a concentration camp, but the hand picked specialists are still prisoners - stripped of their families and their dignity. The story centers around Burger (August Diehl) with his deep seated desire to resist the Nazis in every possible way and Sorowitz (Karl Markovics) who pragmatically simply want to survive.

As a film about the horrors of the Holocaust, this is pretty mild stuff - our protagonists are subtly removed from the worst of it. It's an interesting story anyway - particularly regarding the CO Herzog, who believes in a very unNazi way that you can get more flies with honey than vinegar. As I mentioned, the production values are superb, and the acting is top notch. But I'm afraid to say that I didn't feel I got anything more out of the experience than a history lesson. Just Ok. See the website here, (artsy and none too easy to navigate.)

Lust, Caution

I'll confess that I'm a trifle smitten with Ang Lee. Ever since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I'm afraid. It started with a simple fascination with his visual style and morphed into adoration with Brokeback Mountain and the amazing gift he seems to have of drawing out and making visual the emotional turmoils of his principals. Lust, Caution couldn't hold a candle to either of those films, but it gave me a nifty little fix nonetheless. Gorgeous visual stylization and raw, emotional depth are abundant. (Some rather visual sex is also abundant and earned the film an NC-17.)

The story is a bit simplistic - your basic college kids get passionate about taking down the bad guys who are collaborating with the occupying other bad guys type of thing. The place is Japanese occupied Shanghai during WWII and the drama department at the local U decides to help the war effort by attempting to infiltrate the household of local head Bad Guy with an eye to off him. Of course the only one to get in is the babyfaced beauty with a crush on the leading man, and then she's asked to use her feminine wiles to ensnare him. It then gets a wee bit fuzzy about who ensnares whom, there is a lot of, um, the stuff that gets the NC17, and a highly predictable ending.

That said, I still ate it up with a spoon. The sets are lavish, the costuming supurb and that unmistakable Ang Lee camera angle/lighting genius is on full display. But even better were the beautiful performances of Tony Leung and Tang Wei as bad guy and beauty respectively. If eyes are the windows to the soul, I could have watched this film without subtitles and understood it perfectly - so nuanced are the glances, so naked and raw. Guess I'm still smitten.
Read another review here.

Thesis

It has been suggested that Alenjandro Amenabar is one of the best things to come out of Spain since paella. I have to admit that I found his direction of The Others incredibly gifted... particularly since he was working in a foreign language. To truly appreciate his talent, however, you will need to check out some of his Spanish work. Thesis is a nifty, creepy place to start.

Angela (Ana Torrent, recently Katherine in The Other Boleyn Girl) is an undergrad on a deadline. Her thesis is on violence in film, whether it's ethical to exploit it and why death and mayhem is always so fascinating. This leads to the acquisition of a videotape that apparently records the horrific murder of a former student of the university... and a private investigation - who killed her and who recorded the deed. Enter Chema (Fele Martinez) another film student with his own fascination with violence, and handsome, charming Bosco (Eduardo Noriega, yum!) who seems unnaturally fascinated with Angela. So who's next for a screen test?

Amenabar does a fine job in weaving in a lot of repressed sexuality, and Torrent is fabulous at maintaining a dance of obsession and terror. But the real fun comes from a constant jumpiness that builds throughout the film. By the time you know she's in real trouble, you're just as frightened as our heroine. Down to your last match in a dark basement.... See another review here.

Blame it on Fidel!

Most "coming of age" films focus rather myopically on puberty and new found sexuality. It is a rarer thing to find a film that concentrates on a child reaching the age of reason and the realization that there are "others" who have feelings too. Julie Gavras has given us this gem of a film that does just that, with a back drop of social and political unrest. It's quite a worthy study.

Nine year old Anna (a gifted Nina Kervel) has a perfect little life - doting parents, a lovely home, a wonderful nanny who cooks delicious meals and the comfort of catechism class at her private school. But when her aunt and cousin come to stay with them, Anna's world turns upside down. Her upwardly mobile parents abandon their cushy jobs and become radical political activists and all Anna can see is what is being taken away from her - they move to a small apartment and eat peasant food, she is denied religious lessons and the house is suddenly full of bearded men and crying women who talk and eat and take her parents time. Kervel is brilliant at scowling and plotting her revenge and watching her grow to take in new ideas is decidedly prickly. It's hard to root for Anna, but you'll love her all the same.

Set in France in the early 70's Blame it on Fidel! captures an interesting period in world history that I wasn't terribly familiar with, the communist revolution in Cuba followed by the socialist election of Allende in Chile. The fervor of those caught up in these new ways of thinking and the hope for a better world caused a lot of stodgy, traditional folks to think again. Told from the perspective of a child - a child emerging from the familiarity of childhood things toward the horizons of adulthood - this is a sweet metaphor. Well worth an evening... see another review here.

The Sea Inside

The Oscars are tonight and so I felt inspired to let you in on the first time I laid eyes on Javier Bardem, who is very likely to win his first statuette this evening for Best Supporting in No Country for Old Men. He was nominated once before way back in 2000 for another foreign film, Before Night Falls. But now he's full fledged American movie star material at the ripe old age of 39, even though he's been working since he was 2. Go figure. Anyhoo, I fell in love with the guy when I saw him in The Sea Inside.

This is the true story of Ramon Sampedro, who after a terrible diving accident spent some thirty years of his life as a quadriplegic trying to legally attain the right to an assisted suicide. This may sound like dreary subject matter but Bardem is brilliant and director Alejandro Amenabar (The Others) managed to take Sampedro's Letters from Hell and morph it into a screenplay with unbelievable depth and nuance. Rather than being about death or a longing for it, it is instead a story about life and it's quality, and about love and transcendence over circumstance. Every perspective is respectfully explored and if the film should bring you to tears, it will also open your heart.

And so it won Best Foreign Film back in 2005 and began my unrequited adoration of its star. Bardem was 35 when he played Sampedro at 55 and endured hours of makeup and hours in bed immobile. He learned a dialect of Spanish that was unfamiliar to him and how to write with a pencil in his mouth. He is utterly believable in this role and although the film has many fine actors in supporting parts - he is what made it memorable. Long before he played a sociopath with a Buster Brown haircut in a distinctly American film, Bardem had genius. Check out the website here.

Once

I've never been a fan of musicals. The whole concept of people spontaneously bursting into song on a street corner always struck me as, well, odd. People don't behave that way on average, so at the very least it's contrived, and most musicals have lyrics that are, by and large, hokey and forgettable. That said, this is what a musical should be. Read that: this is a story about musicians and their music plays a role in the story. And as I believe all artists put themselves into their art, we come to know these people through their songs. And it's wonderful.

Our guy (Glen Hansard) meets our girl (Marketa Irglova) while playing on the streets of Dublin. He's a vacuum repairman who is airing his painful breakup in the songs he plays on the street corners, she's an immigrant with a past of her own. Together they make music - and through a tempestuous week she pushes him to record his songs and to heal. There isn't a Hollywood ending here, just real emotion and some fine tunes.

Wish more films were made like this, with real people acting like real people. Okay, they are talented people, but none the less. Glen Hansard is the frontman for the Irish band The Frames and he and Marketa have recorded together before, hence the chemistry, I suppose. Needless to say the soundtrack is awesome. Check out the website here.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

The fun thing about civil wars is that whole "brother against brother" mojo. That always gets their heart strings... at least in the movies. Doesn't matter where you set that story line. In The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the story is set in Ireland circa 1920. The people of Ireland have been trying to cast off the yoke of the British Empire for some time and they are tired of occupation, and all the senseless violence and random humiliation that goes with it. (Insert your favorite current event reference here.)

Our brothers are young doctor Damien (the dreamy blue eyed Cillian Murphy) and tough talking Teddy (Padraic Delaney) who's hip deep in the local resistance. After a dose too much of what passes for British justice and against his better judgement, Damien joins the resistance as well. But as happens when ideals hit the cold hard wall of reality, one brother opts for compromise and the two become increasingly oppositional. And of course, high tragedy will follow.

Director Ken Loach delivers a poignant parable of the power of ideas and those willing to kill and die for them and Wind received the honor of Best Film at Cannes in 2006. Murphy always amazes. And Ireland is gorgeous.... Check out the website here.

Death of a President

The controversy surrounding the release of this film in 2006 was brief, noisy and enough to spur my curiosity. Directed by Gabriel Range (who also co-wrote the screenplay,) this British made film broke a lot of taboos by depicting the fictional assassination of a living and sitting US President, George W. Bush. Hilary Clinton called the film, "despicable." The Bush Administration refused to comment. Reviewers were all over the place - calling it everything from a silly marketing ploy to real genius. It won the International Critics Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. It never hit a movie screen in the US.

Although I spent a good deal of the film trying to figure out just what the message might be, I still found it intriguing. Whether you love the Deciderer in Chief or loathe him, it's bound to make you mighty uncomfortable to watch his assassination - a point that makes you wonder if the filmmaker took into account how that discomfort will effect your overall take on the film. It is, however, fascinating to watch how live footage is seamlessly morphed into an apparent documentary complete with the melodramatic real time interviews we all know and hate. (The state funeral must have been Gerald Ford.)

By the way, the message does finally become apparent in the last 10 minutes or so of the film - and it is a worthy one. So I guess I fall into the category of reviewer who found it worth the watch; it was just that thought provoking, even if it does push the limits of taste. You can see the lackluster website here.

Jindabyne

It's the rare director that can set a tone in the opening of a film and maintain that same tone through another 100 or so minutes. Ray Lawrence manages to keep you miserably uncomfortable from the first tense minutes as you watch something bad about to happen right through to the aching end of this haunting and beautiful film. I found myself biting my nails and squirming all the way.

Jindabyne happens to be set in a particularly bleak but gorgeous part of Australia, but it could have been anywhere. The central story line is one of four good old boys on a fishing trip who happen upon a young woman's corpse in the river, and opt to fish first and report later. Well, she was already dead now, wasn't she? The consequences of this thoughtless act then avalanche through the town - made all the more poignant by the fact that the dead girl is aboriginal (read this Mexican, Black, or Minority of Your Choice.)

Stellar performances from all concerned, including Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne, should be noted but it is the screenplay and direction that make this film amazing. Every character has an open wound; they are all profoundly human and all questioning their own motives in every tidy scene. Lawrence doesn't waste a minute or a line. In the end, you feel you know these people and you hurt right along with them. That's genius. Here's another review.

The Lives of Others

When Pan's Labyrinth lost the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, I was shocked. After all, that brilliant little Mexican offering had already won several technical awards usually reserved for our domestic product. It was a tough call, I'm sure, but I have to agree with the Academy on this one. The Lives of Others is a gem.

Set in the German Democratic Republic (read East Germany) before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the film follows a time in the life of Capt. Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe,) a respected officer of the Stasi (read Secret Police) whose job it is to know everything about the"lives of others." After being assigned to watch a squeaky clean playwright and his actress girlfriend, Wiesler discovers that this investigation has less to do with politics than with the sexual aspirations of a ranking official for the girl. His dedication to his work becomes further eroded as he watches the couple drawn deeper into the intrigue of revolution, and with his involvement comes a terrible choice. Surrender his career or let them slip to their doom.

The Lives of Others is a splendid examination of the paranoia bred of oppression and the humanizing effect of "becoming involved." This message is terribly relevant today, complete with unregulated surveillance, blacklisting, and torture. Ulrich Muhe is amazing, making Capt. Wiesler a character who will be hard to forget. We need more films about people making moral choices. Don't miss this haunting masterpiece. Great website here.

Tsotsi

If the purpose of art is to transport the soul - to share the experience of being human- then this film is art in it's highest form. A film of this magnitude transports us, and not only to a foreign land but to the foreign heart as well. The foreign land is South Africa. The foreign heart is that of a "tsotsi," a street thug, and it is a heart so full of darkness and violence that it chills us to the bone.

The blue South African sky seems an unlikely backdrop to the urban ugliness of Johannesburg, where street gangs slide out of the ghetto shantytown to prey on the upper classes. Tsotsi is the icy leader of these violent misfits, a boy without a real name, angry and lethal. One rash act leads to another and a spiral of violence terminates in a messy carjacking of a not so empty car - there's a baby on board. If our hero were as empty as he seems, this may have been a really short film, but something about that vulnerability touches the human in the monster, and he decides to keep it.

Presley Chweneyagae is an actor of remarkable ability. His Tsotsi spends a good deal of this film doing unspeakable things that usually involve guns and/or copious amounts of blood and yet he paints a portrait of a man unravelling. It doesn't happen quickly or magically like it would in an American movie, but Tsotsi rediscovers his humanity. It may be cliche to say that this is a film about the transformative power of love, but if you can make it through the last 10 minutes of this film without crying, check your pulse. No wonder it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2006.

Postscript: the language is a fascinating blend of Zulu, Dutch and English. See another review here.

Pan's Labyrinth

For all you folks who shy away from foreign films because reading dialogue is just soooo tedious, this is one of those times you need to suck it up. This little gem won 3 Oscars for a REASON. Besides being visually stunning in a so-not industrial light and magic sort of way, this is a story that requires some intellectual soul searching. Try to remember you are watching a film made for another culture - and all those lovely countries south of our border - where the magical and the spiritual constantly invade our mortal world.

Director and writer Guillermo Del Toro takes us back to the Spanish civil war, where we meet our heroine Ofelia - brilliantly portrayed by 12 year old Ivana Baquero. Ofelia is living the nightmare of war, shipped off with her pregnant mother to where her stepfather is busy quelling the last of the rebellion. The Captain is a classic bogeyman, oozing menace ... so it's little wonder that Ofelia is not at all put out by creepy bugs that become only slightly less creepy fairies who lead her into things that just get creepier... so is Ofelia's labyrinth real or only a projection of the evils of wartime from a child's mind? Anyway you look at it, it's worth the trip - the effects are great, there's a ton of violence for the boys, but in the end all fairy tales have a happy ending.... or do they?

Official selection from Mexico, Pan's Labyrinth was nominated for Best Foreign Film, and won Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction and Best Makeup against all our domestic stuff. See the official website HERE.