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| Embrace of the Serpent is the first Colombian film to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. |
Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the
Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check
back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.
Best Foreign Language Film
The nominees are:
Embrace of the Serpent
Son of Saul
Theeb
A War
Profile matters as much as anything when it comes to Best
Foreign Language Film. If voters hear a movie is good or read high praise from
critics, they are more likely to seek it out – as would be true of any of us.
So, films that have earned critical accolades, international recognition at
film festivals, and some moderate box-office success have a leg up on the
competition in this category.
The two highest-profile films in this lineup are Son of Saul and Mustang. Son of Saul has
been the presumed frontrunner most of the year, ever since it won four awards,
including the Grand Jury Prize, at the Cannes Film Festival. It picked up the
lion’s share of critics’ awards and won the Golden Globe for foreign language
film. It is also the only film among these to make more than $1 million at the
U.S. box office, though two of these just opened in theaters this month.
Mustang also was a
prizewinner at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, its cast and director have
been everywhere promoting the film and its urgent message, and it is second
behind Son of Saul in box-office take.
It has also been a huge success on the film festival circuit around the world,
picking up prizes for its director, its cast, and its singular vision and
voice. Embrace of the Serpent
(Colombia), Theeb (Jordan), and A War (Denmark) have all enjoyed
tremendous success in their home countries, but their U.S. appeal has been
limited so far, which means we are likely looking at either Son of Saul or Mustang for the win.
Son of Saul (directed by László Nemes) – With Son of Saul, first-time feature director
Nemes has immediately announced himself as a director to watch. Not only is his
film emotionally devastating, but it is technically masterful. Told almost
entirely from a subjective point of view, it follows a member of the
Sonderkommando at Auschwitz as he attempts to give his son a proper burial
before a prison break. The camera wizardry puts the viewer directly in the
place of Saul as he navigates the physical and mental torture of the Holocaust
and tries to complete one final act of good amid the horror.
It is a taxing but rewarding experience, a first-person take
on the Holocaust unlike any ever before attempted in fiction. It puts the
audience on the ground level of an atrocity, trading on the oft-cited maxim
that one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic. Son of Saul shows us the tragedy of a single death within the
context of the unimaginable suffering of untold millions. Star Géza Röhrig
gives one of the best leading-man performances of the year with 90 percent of
the movie playing out in just a tight close-up on his face. Rarely has so much
pain been so viscerally communicated onscreen.
This is just the ninth Hungarian film ever nominated in this
category at the Oscars, and four of those previous nominations came by way of
director István Szabó. Szabó also directed the only Hungarian film to win this
award, Mephisto in 1981. If this film
is any indication, though, Hungarian cinema will find its way back to the
Oscars, and it will be led by Nemes.
Mustang (directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven) – One of the best films of the year, Mustang is about
what happens when we let culture and custom subvert our basic humanity. It
tells the story of five sisters in a small Turkish village whose family tries
to tame them after the smallest of infractions and how the sisters fight back
against their oppressors. That such injustices are allowed to carry on in the
civilized world today should infuriate us as there is no room in society for
these outdated beliefs.
Apart from the vital storytelling, Ergüven, on her first
feature, proves to be a master filmmaker with subtle, inspired direction that
draws on a wide range of influences to achieve a wholly unique effect. Ergüven
slowly tightens the noose around her protagonists until they must choose
whether to be hanged or take up arms and cut the rope. The film walks a fine
line between triumph and tragedy, and its bold, brilliant closing passages seem
to imply the two are not so far removed from one another.
Despite being set in Turkey and all of the film’s dialogue
being spoken in Turkish, Mustang is
actually France’s submission to the Oscars this year. Of course, France has a
long history in the Foreign Language category. This is the country’s record
39th nomination, and with 12 wins, it trails only Italy (14).
Embrace of the Serpent (directed by Ciro Guerra) – Like an
Alejandro Jodorowsky dream filtered through a Werner Herzog nightmare, Embrace of the Serpent is a
hallucinatory trip through the Amazon. It stuns with the beauty of its images,
but it stays with you because of the strength of its ideas. The film follows
somewhat parallel stories of white outsiders coming into the Colombian jungles
and seeking a mythical plant the natives believe has healing properties.
Based loosely on the diaries of German scientist and
explorer Theodor Koch-Grunberg, Embrace
of the Serpent is a damning exploration of the destruction European
settlers brought down upon the forests. The gorgeous black-and-white
photography helps orient the viewer within the denseness of the jungle, while
the script never lets the audience get too comfortable in its loyalties. Questions
of who is good and who is bad matter little. In the end, it comes down to who
respects the natural order of the world and who does not.
This is the first Colombian film to be nominated for Best
Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, and it represents a stunning achievement
in the national cinema. There has to be a first, but rarely is that first so
impressive and so deserving as this.
A War (directed by Tobias Lindholm) – About 80 percent of A War’s nearly two-hour runtime goes by
before we get to the central conflict of the story. By the time the film
arrives at its main plot, we are so invested in all the characters and so deep
in their headspace it becomes devastating to watch them deal with the moral quandary
in which they find themselves.
Lindholm’s storytelling patience allows the audience to get
involved with the characters in a far more intimate way than we are used to in
a more traditional war film. By doing so, the film’s pre-climactic action sequence
is more effective than it otherwise would be because the stakes are not based
in vaguely defined patriotism but in family ties and personal responsibility. These
are people we can relate to in circumstances we could not begin to imagine, and
Lindholm carefully outlines what it means to be a soldier and a human being at
the same time.
Denmark has had 11 films nominated in the Foreign Language
category with three winners. The most recent winner was Susanne Bier’s In a Better World in 2010, while Danish
legend Thomas Vinterberg was the most recent nominee in 2013 with The Hunt, which Lindholm actually
co-wrote with Vinterberg.
Theeb (directed by Naji Abu Nowar) – Nowar is the third
director among this group to have never directed a feature film before. Of the
three, this is the one that feels most like a first film from a storytelling
perspective. The photography is beautiful, and the setting – the Ottoman Empire
during World War I – orients the audience in a highly specific place and time, but
the structure is too loose to be totally engaging.
A young Bedouin boy, Theeb (Jacie Eid Al-Hwietat), tags
along as his brother leads a British soldier through the desert. Along the way,
they encounter bandits, and the mission becomes one of survival. The film’s
themes of loyalty, manhood, and pride are all quite striking, but the plot has
little forward momentum and gets bogged down in its middle section.
This is the first Jordanian film nominated for Best Foreign
Language Film and is just the second ever submitted to the Academy. Hopefully,
the honor will encourage more development in Jordanian cinema and create more
attention for an area of the world that is sadly underrepresented in the film
landscape.
The final analysis
I have no good reason to think this other than just a gut
feeling, but this category feels ripe for an upset. Son of Saul has won every meaningful precursor – and for that
matter, almost every award out there – but it perhaps inspires more
appreciation than passion. In that case, Mustang
would be the likely beneficiary of an upset. However, experience tells me, with
few exceptions – such as 2006 when Pan’s
Labyrinth lost out to The Lives of Others
– the most likely winner prevails. This year, that means Son of Saul.
Will win: Son of
Saul
Should win:
Mustang
Should have been
here: The Tribe
Tomorrow: Best
Animated Feature
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