The Oscars
Saying ‘Ciao Bye-Bye’ to Old Borders
Marja-Leena Hukkanen/Janus Films
Blondin Miguel in the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki's film “Le Havre,” which was shot in France with a French-speaking cast.
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: December 30, 2011
WHEN giants like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa still roamed the earth, foreign-language films tended to adhere to certain guidelines, which helped American audiences know what to expect from them. More often than not directors and screenwriters were working in their native tongues, addressing some aspect of their society or culture, and shooting with a cast that shared their background.But as 2011 ends, a look at the 63 movies competing for a shot at the Academy Award for best foreign-language film suggests that many of those old rules — or boundaries and barriers if you prefer — are disappearing. Increasingly the films in contention for the Oscar are made in a way that is truly international, both in terms of subject matter, which is becoming less introspective and more engaged with the wider world, and practical matters like casting, financing and even choice of language.
Consider, for example, “Le Havre,” Finland’s submission, written and directed by Aki Kaurismaki, best-known in the United States for his two “Leningrad Cowboys” films and his Finland trilogy. His new work was shot in France with a French-speaking cast and offers a warmly sentimental take on an issue that has divided France for a generation or more: how best to deal with the unceasing flow of immigrants and refugees from the country’s former colonies in Africa and Asia.
Last year four of the five foreign-language films nominated for the Oscar, including the eventual winner, Denmark’s “In a Better World,” focused on interactions between characters from prosperous Western countries and people from troubled parts of the developing world. As if to make clear that this is not just a passing fancy, at least five of this year’s submissions also address the issue of migrants and refugees seeking sanctuary in the industrialized West, and from multiple points of view.
In addition to “Le Havre” we have the Italian neo-neorealist film “Terraferma,” in which poor fishermen shelter the African immigrants they encounter on the high seas from the police who would deport them; Romania’s “Morgen,” an absurdist comedy about a Kurdish man trying to get to Germany with the aid of a Romanian ne’er-do-well; and the Netherlands’ “Sonny Boy,” about a Surinamese student who becomes enmeshed in World War II. Canada’s subtly nuanced submission, “Monsieur Lazhar,” whose title character is an Algerian refugee teaching in a troubled Montreal school, also fits easily into this category.
Or look at Wim Wenders’s “Pina,” the German candidate. A visually dazzling performance documentary, shot in 3-D, about the choreographer Pina Bausch and the dance company she created, it has dialogue in nine languages, the result of Mr. Wenders’s decision to let dancers speak in their native languages. Last year’s Oscar race featured the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful,” with its mixture of Spanish, Mandarin and Wolof, and a pair of films, Canada’s “Incendies” and Algeria’s “Outside the Law,” that alternated between French and Arabic; but Mr. Wenders has taken the polyglot notion to an unprecedented level.
This year’s competition also makes clearer than ever that the era in which “foreign” film could be almost a synonym for “European” (even allowing for the prestige enjoyed by directors like Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray, who was awarded an Oscar for lifetime achievement a few months before his death in 1992) has long since passed. It’s still early in the process, but there seems to be a consensus that the film to beat on Oscar night, Feb. 26, is “A Separation” from Iran, a highly praised combination of family drama and legal thriller directed and written by Asghar Farhadi that also appears to be the front-runner for the Golden Globes.
Initially “The Flowers of War,” China’s submission, looked like it might be a contender too, if only because it was made by Zhang Yimou, who has three previous nominations and a global reputation. Those chances now seem slim to none. Reviews have been negative, which is not always fatal and did not prevent the film from getting a Golden Globe nomination. But Academy members are unlikely to vote in a way that condones security agents of an authoritarian government beating up an A-list, Oscar-winning actor like Christian Bale, the film’s star, as happened last month when he was in China for the premiere.
Nonetheless the film, shot in English as well as Japanese and Nanjing dialect, is a watershed, an attempt by the Chinese film industry to connect with the outside world, not just its own captive market of 1.3 billion people. The closing credits indicate that numerous crew members are foreigners based in Beijing, and Chinese film figures have talked, or at least they did before the Bale debacle, of making that city into an international film production center like London with its Pinewood Studio or Rome with Cinecittà.
Even countries we think of as English speaking are getting in on the act. Britain, for example, has submitted a film in Welsh and Spanish, “Patagonia,” that stars Matthew Rhys and the pop singer Duffy in a drama about Welsh colonists in Argentina. Ireland’s candidate, “As If I Am Not There,” is based on a novel written in Serbo-Croatian about the Balkans wars and was shot in that language. And New Zealand’s entry, “The Orator,” about a taro farmer who wants to become a village chief, is described as the first feature film in Samoan.
As the latest installments of “Mission Impossible,” “Transformers,” “Batman” and other franchise films continue to lumber across the screens of American multiplexes, it would be easy to conclude that the United States is being left out of this process. But a handful of American artists — working mostly as directors — have also chosen to get involved.
“In the Land of Blood and Honey,” Angelina Jolie’s directing debut, is a harrowing story of the Bosnian war of the 1990s that was filmed in the local language with actors from the former Yugoslavia. Though it did not qualify for the Oscars, it has received a Golden Globe nomination. The director Joshua Marston, after making “Maria Full of Grace,” a Spanish-language drama about the Colombian drug trade that received an Oscar nomination in 2004, has returned with “The Forgiveness of Blood,” shot in Albania with Albanian actors and about a family feud in that Balkan country.
But Mr. Marston’s experience may also serve as a cautionary tale about the Academy’s slowness to recognize and adapt to the rapidly changing circumstances of film production that has become internationalized in every sense of that word. Albania initially submitted “The Forgiveness of Blood” as its choice, but the movie was disqualified when the Albanian director Bujar Alimani, whose film “Amnesty” had been passed over, complained that Mr. Marston’s film contained too much American content. When the Academy then accepted “Amnesty” as a replacement for “Forgiveness,” Mr. Marston was moved to protest, wondering why “Le Havre” could be allowed to compete as Finnish, and he could not represent Albania.
Still, filmgoers should expect to continue to see more of the same in 2012. Just look at “Norwegian Wood,” the first big foreign film release of the year in the United States, opening on Friday. Based on the novel of the same name by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, whose title comes from the Beatles song, it was filmed by Tranh Anh Hung, a French director of Vietnamese origin, with a Taiwanese cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping Bin, and music by Jonny Greenwood, of the British band Radiohead, and the German experimental rock group Can.
This trend, of course, has been a long time developing. French-Italian co-productions have been a feature of the international film scene since the foreign-language Oscar was first awarded in 1947, and Kurosawa won the second of his three Oscars in 1975 for “Derzu Uzala,” the tale of a Siberian hunter that was shot in Russian and represented the Soviet Union, not his native Japan.
No doubt the French and the Italians will also continue to make frothy comedies and the Scandinavians their autumnal existential dramas. Or at least filmgoers should hope so. But for purposes of representing themselves to Americans at Oscar time, countries around the world seem to see the multilingual, outward-looking film as a promising, if not yet already dominant, mode. Better get used to it.
