A Royal Affair / En kongelig affære (Nikolaj Arcel, 2012, Denmark)

This film seems to have done well in Denmark and it seems poised to do well enough in America. I got the impression that it was going to get released here early in the spring. I got a sticker for checking in to this movie on my GetGlue app, which tells me that someone is actually pushing this movie. It's based on a true story, alledgedly one of the great stories of Danish history, according to the director, who also wrote the screenplay for the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

This film deals with the end of the Danish feudal system and the ultimate rise of the Enlightenment in Denmark. It seems that feudalism lasted longer in Denmark than in the rest of Europe. Mikkel Boe Følsgaard stars as the mad king Christian VII and Alicia Vikander stars as his wife, Queen Caroline. Both actors are relatively new here but give performances good enough that they're considered breakout performances. I particularly like Vikander as the queen. Mads Mikkelsen seems to be the number one actor in Denmark for the past several years. If you're like me, you've probably seen him in After the Wedding and Flame and Citron. If you aren't like me, you've probably seen him in Clash of the Titans and Casino Royale. In any event, he's at the center of the film as the Enlightenment oriented doctor beloved by both the king and queen, who have pretty much been estranged since they first met. In these days when the oligarchy is threatening centuries of progress, this film actually seems pretty relevant. I think we have this illusion that the forces in our world which enjoy wealth and power could somehow be checked for the greater good if the need and the will arose. This film argues that, at least in the short term, it's best not to underestimate them that has.
B

Sister / L'enfant d'en haut (Ursula Meier, 2012, Switzerland)

This film somehow feels a lot like Meier's last film, Home. The main character here is 12 year old Simon, who seems to support himself and, to some extent his sister, by stealing from tourists at the nearby ski resort. Much of the film is him going up to the top of the mountain and stealing skis and so forth. He's staying with his sister, and things seem off, and they are. A lot of the films I saw at the film festival seem to consider those people in the society whom the larger society fails. It was kind of hard for me to watch, though I'm not sure everyone would feel the same way. Anyway, it's Switzerland's submission for the 85th Academy Awards.

B

Our Children / À perdre la raison (Joachim LaFosse, 2012, Belgium)

Belgium's submission to the Academy Awards foreign film competition, this film is apparently based on a true story. Perhaps if I had known that going in, it would informed my viewing in such a way that I didn't find the film such a downer. It kind of uses the Lars Von Trier template where you start out with this great woman, and this case a very likable new husband, and drag her through endless unpleasantness until something dramatic happens. The film starts with the woman ( Émilie Dequenne) in an emergency room telling the nurses that her children needed to be buried in Morocco. We then see some small coffins being transported and then we start at the beginning of their friendship. She's a school teacher dating this resident at a hospital or something, played by the guy from A Prophet (Tahar Rahim). The old guy plays his friend/mentor is the old guy from A Prophet (Niels Arestrup). For financial reasons the couple move in with the older friend, who turns out to be married to the guy's sister, and the wife starts banging out kids while the audience is left wondering what kind of strange relationship is going on with the two men. The husband gradually becomes less and less sympathetic, but the movie still seems to expect us to sympathize with him and his desperate family. I just read a review that called the film emotionally draining and that's exactly how I would describe it. Maybe it's because I'm not particularly interested in all this breeding stuff, but I didn't find anything particularly appealing about the film as a whole, though I like most of the actors well enough.
C

After Lucia / Después de Lucía (Michel Franco, 2012, Mexico)

This film is Mexico's submission to the Academy Awards best foreign language film competition. It seems to be pretty popular with both audiences and critics, but somehow it didn't work for me as much as I expected it to.

In the film, Alejandra and her father have just relocated to Mexico City from Puerto Vallarta following the traumatic death of her mother. For reasons which can be speculated upon based on how the mother died, Alejandra never tells anyone at school that her mother is dead. At school, she falls in with a group of bratty, pot smoking miscreants who seem to be the popular kids. One weekend at a party she gets drunk and lets one of the boys film her having sex with him and the video gets sent all around school. For some reason, possibly relating to the jealousy of one of the other girls, Alejandra is then subject to bullying which is almost too harrowing to watch at times. The ending goes a somewhat different direction that you might expect, but it's not particularly satisfying. For me, the film's scenes of extreme cruelty seemed hard to believe, and this was exacerbated by failing sometimes to understand why these characters made some of the choices they made. It's definitely moving sometimes, maybe horrifying is a better word, but I'm not sure it earns the emotions it conjures.
C

Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012, Romania)

It's so funny how I've been putting off writing about this movie because it's so hard for me to discuss things that I like. Silly me. This is definitely one of my favorite films of the festival. It's from the director of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. On the surface, this movie couldn't seem much more different, but it actually has a lot in common. As in the earlier film, Mungiu creates here an unsettling atmosphere that permeates the entire film, and really both films are about the ways in which the state has failed its people and the search for an understanding of modern Romanian identity. They're also both made beautifully. There is a sort of grace in this film which I don't know how to explain.

This film is based on a non fiction novel based on events that took place in 2005 in a rural monastary in northeastern Romania. I'm fascinated by how divergent the various accounts of the real life events have been.  It's about two friends who grew up in a small town orphanage where they were subject to all kinds of abuse and exploitation. One of the girls has gone to work in Germany as a waitress, perhaps, and the other has entered a very traditional monastary located out in the hills outside the town they grew up in. It's traditional in that it has no electricity or running water, not in the sense that it's old. I read a great article about how all these churches and monastaries are popping up all over Romania since the Iron Curtain fell and the crisis is that there aren't enough qualified clergy to run all these places. The story behind this particular monastary is an interesting enough story for its own film.

Anyway, the girl who has been working in Germany, Voichita, comes back to Romania to get her diploma so she can get a new job and perhaps stay in Germany indefinitely. She seems to believe that her friend, Alina, will leave the monastary and come with her, but Alina doesn't seem to understand it this way. Voichita stays with her friend in the monastary and they have plans to leave, but some sort of mental illness or something seems to get in the way, which naturally leads to an exorcism.

In the accounts that I've read online, either the character upon which Voichita was based was schizophrenic, an ordinary modern girl with no history of mental illness, or a convert who joined the order and begged for Satan to be driven from her body. In real life, the priest was only 31 years old. A former soccer player who had been recruited to run a monastary after studying theology in a community college after a year. I guess there had been monks there, but they all left when all these nuns showed up.

I found the film fascinating. I really enjoyed reading about the actual events after I saw the film. I would love to read the novel the film is based upon, but it doesn't seem to be available in English, at least in the USA.

It's a beautifully shot film and everything about it was good, in my opinion. But the audience I saw it with seemed just as divided as the reviews I've read. The guy two people down from me said as the credits began to roll that it was beautiful. A moment later, as people began filing out this lady kind of passed over us saying how horrible it was. After they both left the lady who had been talking to me earlier said she thought it was pretty but she didn't know what it was supposed to be about. I suggested that it was interesting because it dramatized the tensions between the old world and the modern world. I also said it was interesting how many of Romania's social problems contributed to this situation. You have the notorious Romanian orphanages, which in this case didn't protect the children from a notorious pedophile filmmaker, and it's hard not to see that the situation would have been avoided if Romania's healthcare system hadn't been so overburdened and inaccessible. It seems like the societies of the world are returning to their natural states, in which the state is only there once they've failed long enough to have somebody at which to point a finger.
A

Caesar Must Die / Cesare deve morire (Paolo & Vittorio Taviani, Italy, 2012)

I can't believe this movie won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival. It should play well with the sort of middle class elderly person that seemed to eat it up when I saw it because it's simplistic, phony, unoriginal, sentimental, and generally tedious. It presents itself as a documentary, but it seems pretty obvious that there is no spontaneous dialogue in the film. I can't tell for sure if the dialogue is as annoying and fake sounding in Italian as the English subtitles seemed to suggest, but I sure enough hated this movie all the same. Such a strange bit of well-intentioned exploitation.
This film, at least as bland as The Secret in Their Eyes, was submitted by the Italians for best foreign film. Given the track record of the award, I'll be surprised if this stupid movie doesn't take the whole shabang.
I think the only reason I'm not giving it an F is that it was at least handsomely filmed.
D

Ranking 2009's 2010 Best Foreign Film Oscar Submissions

Of the 65 films submitted for this year's Academy Award for best foreign film, these are the eighteen I've seen, in order of my preference.

1. France, A Prophet

2. Israel, Ajami

3. Korea, Mother

4. Germany, The White Ribbon

5. Peru, The Milk of Sorrow

6. Mexico, Backyard

7. Romania, Police adj.

8.Colombia, The Wind Journeys

9. Slovenia, Landscape No. 2

10. Estonia, December Heat

11. UK, Afghan Star

12. Denmark, Terribly Happy

13. Hungary, Chameleon

14. Bulgaria, The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner

15. Belgium, The Misfortunates

16. India, Harishchandrachi Factory

64. Greece, Slaves in Their Bonds

65. Argentina, The Secret in Their Eyes


I thought the top six were great, the next few were good, and the last two were horrible. I look forward to getting to see more of them as they become available.

The Secret in Their Eyes / El Secreto de sus ojos (Juan José Campanella, 2009)

I can't think of how to describe my reaction to this movie without using a string of strong epithets. I mean, seriously. This movie is BAD. Really bad. It's kind of like Law & Order: Criminal Intent but with even worse writing. Every single review I've been able to find of this movie online is extremely positive (even the review at Variety is glowing!) and refers to this movie as an exciting, romantic thriller. Um, okay. I don't think I'm giving too much away here by saying that the bad guy is pinpointed by the cop based on his eyes in some old pictures in some old scrapbook of the victim. And then the big insight as to how they'll catch the guy? He likes soccer. Yes, in Argentina, he likes soccer. They may as well have had the entire male population do a lineup for Jesus fuck's sake. But that's not all. I don't want to imply that this is just a police procedural. It's much more meandering and half-baked than all that. The protagonist is in love with his boss. I promise you that although this element of the film may intermittently seem like it has the potential to finally get interesting, it really doesn't. I feel like, if you're living in a retirement home and feeling nostalgic for the good old days when things were easy and you didn't have to think about things to know what was what, then you might like this movie. Otherwise, aside from a few competent camera shots, there is nothing interesting about this movie. I'm really appalled that this movie was shortlisted for the foreign film Oscar, let alone that it won! I mean, we all know that the Academy is composed of a bunch of idiots for the most part but who the hell was on the foreign film panel that thought this was worthy of being shortlisted, let alone being an actual nominee?!?!?! That is some fucking bullshit. So you have an empty plodding thud of a film beating out such outstanding films as A Prophet, The White Ribbon, Ajami, and The Milk of Sorrow. Wow. Fucking disgusting. Things like this make me hate this culture. I'm not even sure I care to find out what the hell is wrong with Americans that this is the kind of shit they like. It sort of amuses me that the Oscars and the Spirit awards were no better (and is many cases worse) than the Golden Globes this year. This movie is puke and not worth your time, if you have a brain, but watch it for yourself and let me know. F

The Milk of Sorrow / La teta asustada (Claudia Llosa, 2009, Peru)

What a curious movie. It's hard for me to watch it without being conscious of the foreign film Oscar race. I've seen three of the other nominees and several of the other submitted films and I'm not sure this would have made my list of nominees. It's hard to say though because I feel like I'm still digesting this movie and want to see it again. I certainly loved the way the movie opens. The singing and the deathbed with the mountains in the window and all that are kind of thrilling. The story was touching. I appreciated the restraint. I don't know how I feel about this movie. I liked the music and the framing and the cinematography quite a bit. The mother was phenomenal in her one scene. The protagonist, Fausta, is mysterious and compelling. I sort of felt like there were things going on that I didn't understand culturally, such as the dynamic with the protagonist's boss. There's this great scene though where Fausta's going to work for the rich pianist for the first time and they walk into her yard through a sort of garage door type thing and that scene is an extremely effective evocation of class dynamics. It's past my bedtime. I don't know what I think about this movie yet so I'm going to give it a B+ for now. I think there is probably more depth and truth to this movie than in three or four of the other nominees but I guess I still would have voted for A Prophet just because of how intensely cinematic yet graceful it was. Of course, there's grace here as well. I just don't know. I'm rambling now. Bedtime!

A Prophet / Un prophète (Jacques Audiard, 2009, France)

What serendipity that I happen to watch a movie like this when only this morning I had been revisiting Pauline Kael's "Trash, Art, and the Movies.". (Note her use of the Oxford comma!) This is quite an exhilarating film. At times the sustained tension is almost maddening. The film certainly created a tone and held me transfixed for the duration of the running time and although the character is certainly not a hero in any moral sense I certainly found myself pulling for him and feeling elated at his triumphs. Jacques Audiard is a director whose name I had not previously been familiar with although I watched his 1996 film A Self Made Hero almost ten years ago and I remember quite liking that film. His 2005 film The Beat That My Heart Skipped has been chilling on my Netflix queue for quite some time now and I'm certainly anxious to get around to watching that now.

I loved the use of music here, both on the score and the song that plays in the final moments of the film which is too surprising and fitting and perfect and fantastic to name here since I shouldn't like to ruin that surprise for anyone who might happen to read this. Tahar Rahim makes what seems most certainly to be a breakthrough performance as Malik, a 19 year old man who is being incarcerated for six years for some kind of violent incident involving a cop. The film sort of chronicles these six years. He has no friends on the outside and seems to have grown up parentless in assorted institutions. Shortly after he arrives in prison the Corsican gangster who seems to run the place informs him that if he doesn't kill this guy who's about to go to trial and make trouble for the Corsicans, he's dead. It's a great performance and the plot is exquisite with its connections and surprises. I'm not sure what to say here about it but I really loved this movie. I don't know if The White Ribbon is the best of the nominees in the foreign film category this year but, having seen three of the nominees, I'd probably rank it second or third, with A Prophet being my favorite. I think I'd even put Ajami in second place because it showed me some things I didn't know about the world. A+

Revanche (Götz Spielmann, 2008, Austria)

I've now seen four of last year's five nominees for Best Foreign Film. The one I've yet to see is Departures, the winner of the group. So far my favorite is probably The Baader Meinhof Komplex. Last night I watched the Austrian nominee Revanche. I haven't seen any of the director's films. I mean, I started watching Antares one day while I was killing time but then I had to go and I never got around to finishing the movie, although I was enjoying it. In any event, I watched this one last night. It starts of in a Viennese brothel called Cinderella. Our heroine is a Ukrainian employee of this establishment, working off a debt of $60,000. Her boyfriend, the bouncer, wants a similar amount of money so he can partner with a friend in opening a bar. The bouncer ends up being the protagonist, more or less. We find out that he's an ex-con with an ageing grandfather who lives out in the country. He decides to rob a bank to make their dreams come true and the girlfriend, Tamara, reluctantly finally agrees to support him on this if she can ride along in the car. He robs the bank. The cop husband of his grandfather's neighbor gets mixed up with them and inadvertently shoots Tamara through the rearview window. This is pretty much the setup for the revenge which I had read was coming but by this point I had completely forgotten about because I was so absorbed in the story of them escaping from the gangster pimps. I don't know what to make of this movie. My main thought is that it's beautifully shot. There were many striking shots in the film that had me "Wow"-ing. I don't know if this movie says much about revenge. Maybe it's just about grief? I mean, there is some revenge in the movie but I feel like it's mixed heavily with understanding. I don't know, I have a headache today. B

Ajami (Scandar Copti & Yaron Shandi, 2009)

I finally made it to see the Israeli nominee for Best Foreign Film today. It was really good. I've seen it described as a network narrative but I don't know that it's as sprawling as that implies. It has that puzzle out of order thing going on though and it actually ends up being pretty effective, I think. It takes place in what seems to be an Arab city on the outskirts of Tel Aviv called Jaffa. It's kind of set up into chapters and it starts off with a string of murders and a demand for blood money and there's all kind of misery and intrigue that follows. It seems pretty true to what's going on over there. It's a mess. But it's a powerful and beautiful film. Watching the movie, it's easy to empathize with most of the characters but you walk away wondering what it will take to bring about some rational decision making. The movie seemed similar to Gomorrah in parts but it ends up feeling more graceful. It's strange that a film with such an ending as it has--tragic and violent--can leave me feeling a kind of grace.

I've spent so much of the past fifteen years gorging myself on American films, sucking up everything on TCM or the Sundance/Landmark Theaters/Independent Spirit waves and now that I've started watching more contemporary world cinema, instead of fixating on those films highlighted in the Auteurs chapters of any film history textbook, I feel like a sponge desperate for news and truths from the world. In the past six months since I stopped reading books and starting binging on movies I feel like I've gained so much understanding about so many modes of existence I had never given enough thought.

It was really great. I hope you see it. A/A-