In advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis has been looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.
After that trip back to the Documentary race, we're ending the week by spotlighting the other category that's taken the hugest strides to adjust its nominating process and champion better work. It’s also no accident that I’m ending with a category that Nathaniel has tracked with unusual care and detail since Oscar-focused websites have existed—indeed, long before many of his peers paid more than cursory attention. The 72nd Academy Awards took place eight years before the transformative addition of an Executive Committee to the vetting process that produces the annual roster for "Best Foreign Language Film," which of course this year got rebranded as "Best International Film". This category used to be heavy with inoffensive mediocrities, or sometimes offensive ones. Tracking down the contenders, which was often difficult to do, rarely felt like making contact with the best of world cinema in any given year, and with very few exceptions the winners across the 1990s were an undistinguished lot. (Or maybe you’re a major devotée of Mediterraneo or Kolya?)
By that standard, 1999 was a pretty good year, since I imagine that Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother would be most people's choice as the best film to cop this prize during the whole decade. This critical and popular favorite needed no help from any Executive Committee to stay alive during the balloting. In fact, the only mystery is why the movie couldn't make more inroads into admittedly competitive races like Actress, Supporting Actress, Director, Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing, or Picture...
Today's more expansive, international Academy would probably allow at least some of that to happen. As it was, All About My Mother cruised to victory over the 46 other films submitted for consideration in this category—a record tally at the time, but barely over half the number AMPAS has reaped in recent years.
I've always liked All About My Mother, and always revered Cecilia Roth in it, even if it was never my favorite Almodóvar. (That’s still Talk to Her by a large margin, probably followed by What Have I Done to Deserve This?) The movie opened just as I'd finished four years of studying feminist scholarship, queer theory, and film in college, where I wrote my senior thesis about Tennessee Williams and one of my very last papers about John Cassavetes's Opening Night. This could have made me a ridiculously ideal audience for All About My Mother, but at first I responded to the movie as a somewhat blunt statement of ideas in which I'd been immersed for years: about gender fluidity, performativity, postmodern aesthetics, and the complexities and tensions of women's solidarity. As time has passed, I've repeatedly taught the film and realized how rare and special it is, especially as it became clear that its themes and generosity of spirit, which felt ubiquitous in my student years, were hardly the norm in cinema or in the world. It’s also a much more slippery act of storytelling and characterization than I initially perceived, and though I still feel its director has made even richer, trickier films, this one deserves its universally high regard, further cemented this month by its arrival into the Criterion Collection.
Spotlight Films: The other nominees!
Before this project I'd never bothered to watch any of All About My Mother's competitors, which were such evident also-rans that the Academy invited Almodóvar's dear colleagues Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas to present this category.
That yielded one of the telecast's all-time most joyous announcements. (I know we link this clip frequently at The Film Experience, but honestly, everyone should watch it every day.)
At first, delving into this category certified why I'd been avoiding it and why Almodóvar's win, as distinguished and adventurous as it was by that era's standards, was nonetheless a foregone conclusion. The weakest of the lot is Sweden's Under the Sun, directed by English expat Colin Nutley. The story involves a lonely 39-year-old farmer who places an ad for a female housekeeper, in hopes of finding love. That could be a horror-show of a premise—workplace harassment pitched as sun-dappled romance!—but Rolf Lassgård's central performance as the farmer is disarmingly gentle and vulnerable, especially once the character's virginity is revealed. We could use more gentle stories about men of any age learning non-defensively and non-toxically to be intimate, in multiple senses. Lassgård, star of future Foreign Film nominees After the Wedding and A Man Called Ove, and costar Helena Bergström, the director's wife and consistent collaborator, achieve a sweet, mature rapport in these scenes, despite the crude script machinations that bring them together. Though the personalities involved are quite different, the bond between these two reminded me of what John Hawkes and Helen Hunt pulled off in The Sessions.
Unfortunately, nearly everything else about Under the Sun feels like a misfire. The scripting and editing of the first 100 minutes are lax and repetitive, despite the total obviousness of what's afoot. By contrast, the last 20 minutes, when predictable conflicts and backstories finally emerge, feels crazily rushed. The third character in the film, a young, aspiring ladies' man named Erik (Johan Widerberg), who is inexplicably friends with the farmer and unsurprisingly drawn to his gorgeous new housekeeper, is written and performed with such maximal abrasiveness that the whole film grows unpleasant. Nutley has very banal ideas of what to film and what to cut to (lonely roads, lonely planes overhead, literal lovebirds), and for some reason, via lighting and/or color grading, he has slathered the Swedish countryside with golden and yellow-green tints that look unconfident in its natural loveliness and, at times, outright tacky.
Solomon & Gaenor, the rare nominee from the UK, is infinitely better-photographed, care of Nina Kellgren, who imprinted so many beautiful images forever on our brains in Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston. Her sensuous, evocative lensing is easily one of the standout features of this star-crossed love story between a young Welsh woman, Gaenor (gorgeous Nia Roberts), and a Jewish fabric vendor, Solomon (an early film role for Horatio Hornblower himself, Ioan Gruffudd). Solomon lives in a growing Yiddish-speaking community on the far outskirts of this already-isolated Welsh mining village, but he disguises his Judaism while courting Gaenor, even using the false name "Sam." Roberts’s performance is slightly more polished than Gruffudd’s, but both actors and director Paul Morrison do a tender, artful job of suggesting the kind of quick, ardent, youthful attachment that seems, quite suddenly, on the cusp of becoming a lifelong commitment, even if circumstances keep it on the perpetual brink of a breakup.
Morrison attends better than Nutley does to his supporting cast and shows more trust in the existing beauty of his chosen landscapes. It also helps that Kellgren’s moody cinematography dramatizes the light and dark tones in Solomon & Gaenor’s story, whereas Under the Sun aggressively pastoralizes everything in sight. Still, even with a crisis of faith, a culture clash, an imperiled romance, a labor strike, a series of communal shamings, an increasingly violent xenophobia, and more on its plate, Solomon & Gaenor doesn’t always suggest a deep probe beneath its handsome surface. Despite all the dialogue in Welsh and in Yiddish, there’s enough English in this film that I’m surprised Oscar allowed the nomination. It’s definitely a worthy rental and has some understandably committed fans, but I’m not convinced it belongs in anybody’s time capsule of the year’s best in international cinema.
I’d say the same of East/West, the French nominee, a slightly-above-average historical thriller from Régis Wargnier, whose 1992 film Indochine remains, astoundingly, the last French submission to win this prize. (Michael Haneke’s Amour, despite being set in Paris, with dialogue exclusively in French, was officially Austria’s submission the year it won.) In a style nearly as generic as its title, the movie at least has a worthy and memorable subject: the fate of legions of people of Russian descent who were invited to repatriate in the USSR after the end of World War II. Only afterward did they discover that Stalin’s regime viewed most of them as faithless to their homeland, even suspected them of spying, and would just as soon imprison or kill them as allow them a good life in the Soviet Union. Marie Golovin (Sandrine Bonnaire), the lead character, is a French woman who took the generous step of following her Paris-based husband Aleksei (Oleg Menshikov) in his impulse to return home. She grows dismayed not only by the conditions they encounter in the USSR but by what she perceives as Alexei’s over-willingness to play along with the abusive regime. The plot gets novelistically complex, but suffice it to say that Marie, stymied in her desire to flee, starts an affair with an orphaned young swimmer (the late Sergei Bodrov, Jr.), that Alexei pursues his own indiscretions with another woman in their crowded building, and that Indochine star Catherine Deneuve shows up as a touring French actress who is willing to risk quite a bit in protest of Stalinist cruelties.
Besides All About My Mother, East/West was the only movie to repeat as a nominee for Foreign Language Film at the Oscars and the Golden Globes. (One of the HFPA’s other contenders was The Red Violin, the movie I wrote about on Monday.) I get that there’s always an audience for this kind of movie, and East/West isn’t bad, but it’s not particularly fresh at the level of style and is inconsistently executed even in areas where it seems to try harder. César nomination be damned, Bonnaire fails to make Marie all that interesting or sympathetic, striking a series of attitudes in different scenes that don’t add up to a fully coherent person, and liable at disparate times to be too emotive or too withdrawn. (I would say all the same things about the score, by Kenneth Branagh’s standby composer Patrick Doyle.) Deneuve’s not around for most of the film, and Bodrov stays stuck in a narrow expressive range. Acting honors accrue by merit but also by default to Menshikov, a dashing Russian who seemed briefly poised for international stardom in the wake of Burnt by the Sun, Prisoner of the Mountains, The Barber of Siberia, and this movie, but mostly returned to stage work throughout the current century. His character’s divided loyalties to two different nations and two different world systems mark the most interesting conflict in the film. His heart is the natural site where the “East/West” tensions flagged by the title could be most richly explored, if only the script weren’t so often focused elsewhere.
So, three shots, and three conspicuous non-threats to All About My Mother’s preeminence in this race. I was, however, delighted and surprised to encounter a serious rival in Eric Valli’s Himalaya, announced as a nominee under its original title, Caravan. This film, produced and directed by Frenchmen, with dialogue largely in Tibetan, nonetheless became Nepal’s first-ever submission to the Oscars and, as of this writing, remains its only nominee. As a logistical undertaking, even the multinational sprawl of East/West’s narrative cannot compete with what Himalaya’s producers and its 15-member crew attempted, taking 200 porters, 150 yaks, and a cast of nonprofessionals as high as 19,000 feet above sea level, three weeks’ walk from the nearest road. These risky locations were threatened at the beginning of the seven-month shoot by heavy snow and at the end of that period by encroaching monsoons.
Luckily, the movie managed to get made, and even more luckily, it’s almost as astounding as its own production history, giving off major Atanarjuat vibes as an exceptional combination of modern techniques and folkloric tradition. At the start of Himalaya, a band of young men return to their village with their herd of yaks and reveal that Lhakpa, next in line for chiefdom of this tribe, has died during the trek. Lhakpa’s father Tinle (Thilen Lhondup) immediately suspects that the young, handsome leader of this returning cohort, Karma (Gurgon Kyap), has eliminated Lhakpa to commence his own bid to become chief. Tinle insists that Lhakpa’s son Tsering (Karma Wangiel), not Karma, is the rightful heir, but since Tsering is not yet 10 years old, Tinle volunteers himself as temporary leader. Most imminently, this means that this aged and volatile old man will spearhead the next yak caravan, delivering the salt harvested from their region, the sale of which is crucial to everyone’s survival.
Narrative twists are worth preserving in Himalaya, especially since so many cruxes of plot and character remain uncertain for quite a long time. Did Karma indeed kill Lhakpa? Is Tinle right to suspect him, and worthy of his temporary re-ascent to power? Or is he a hothead too stubborn to admit his fragility and too obedient to centuries-old custom to see when he’s endangering his people and their only profitable export? What ensues are two separate delegations, one led by Tinle and the other by Karma, following two disparate routes from their remote region of Nepal (which the filmmakers secured very rare permits to film) to the faraway markets. The characters, like the filmmakers, have to trek around thin, unstable mountain passes in inclement conditions, while these and other intra-group tensions abound. Himalaya thus packs the tension of The Wages of Fear and the character drama of a Fitzcarraldo or an Aguirre, the Wrath of God but is also very much its own thing in story, theme, mood, and cultural context.
Director Valli, who had lived with and studied with the ethnically Tibetan Dolpopa people of Nepal for many years, refuses to simplify the film into a blanket defense of Tradition or a full embrace of Change. The César-winning photography is exquisite, not just because the landscapes themselves are staggering but because the placement of the cameras is shrewd from a storytelling perspective, and often incredible in practical terms. Thilen Lhondup, the non-actor playing Tinle, was a longtime acquaintance of Valli’s and apparently quite a handful on set; his frequent walkouts adding further delays and morale problems on an already-stressful shoot. Still, through whatever combination of direction, charisma, and personal ingenuity, he contributes a layered and fiery performance, as memorable as any from this great year for cinema. It’s almost impossible to compare my enthusiasm for a movie I just saw for the first time this week to an acknowledged classic I’ve been mulling and teaching for 20 years, but I suspect Himalaya might actually have secured my vote in this competition.
Of course, even among a mere 47 submissions, Oscar’s eligibility list is full of movies that are surprising or even bewildering in their absence, especially by comparison to most of those that made the cut. Chief among these omissions were that year’s champs of two eminent festivals. The Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Rosetta has become such a cinematic landmark, and the directors such leading figures of global filmmaking, that younger cinephiles may not realize what a stink David Cronenberg’s jury made in selecting this feature for the Palme d’or at Cannes. Most pundits had called that race as an easy win for Best Director recipient Pedro Almodóvar. (The great Spaniard still awaits his Palme.) All About My Mother’s triumph with Oscar probably pleased its biggest fans as an act of restorative justice, but it’s absurd that Rosetta wasn’t short-listed.
Meanwhile, Tony Bui’s Three Seasons, the sensation of that year’s Sundance Festival, and an Independent Spirit Award winner for Lisa Rinzler’s exquisite cinematography, merited inclusion as well. It’s possible that voters saw Vietnam’s submission as insufficiently “foreign,” since Bui is a Vietnamese American raised in California, and Harvey Keitel has an important role. But again, Solomon & Gaenor is substantially in English, and as sharply lensed as that one is, Three Seasons is on another level, visually and atmospherically. Like so many films distributed in the US by the late, great October Films (see also: The Addiction, Career Girls, Female Perversions, Jude, Nadja, Ruby in Paradise, Tous les matins du monde), Three Seasons has become very hard to see over here. While this isn’t a guaranteed truth, I’d like to believe that the Oscar nomination it deserved would have kept it in readier circulation, and Bui’s subsequent career more robust.
The submission list for Foreign Language Film in 1999 encompasses several other titles worth tracking down, including two queer titles to complement All About My Mother: Germany’s Globe-nominated lesbian drama Aimee & Jaguar and Greece’s tense, teen-centered drama From the Edge of the City. Bhutan, like Nepal, submitted for the first time in 1999 and probably came close to a nod for its crowd-pleasing, kid-focused soccer drama The Cup. Mexico’s No One Writes to the Colonel, with featured roles for Salma Hayek and All About My Mother’s Marisa Paredes, competed for the Palme d’or alongside Rosetta and the Almodóvar film, as did Aleksandr Sokurov’s characteristically strange and demanding film Moloch. That eccentric, dreamlike portrait of Hitler, Goebbels, and their wives earned the Screenplay prize from Cronenberg’s jury. Speaking of major auteurs, Brazil’s Carlos Diegues and Poland’s Andrzej Wajda had films in contention, with Orfeu and Pan Tadeusz. One of the most popular entries in Denmark’s short-lived but highly influential Dogme ‘95 movement, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s Mifune, might have added some welcome levity to the list. And in a(nother) strong year for women filmmakers, Oscar might well have invited new work by two accomplished Canadians: Léa Pool, representing that country with Set Me Free, or Indian-born Deepa Mehta, whose film Earth was the most controversial, least commercially successful, but, I think, most artistically accomplished entry in the series that began with Fire and ended with the Oscar-nominated AndfromCanadaWater.
Hopefully, then, this entry makes clear what my whole week’s worth of essays was meant to suggest: that there is always more buried treasure in a given year’s list of Oscar nominees than the most celebrated contenders; that even weaker nominees are worth examining closely, because the aesthetic and political backgrounds for whatever doesn’t work are often useful to ponder; and that the nomination list is only the starting-point for wider investigations of what makes at year special and distinctive, in and beyond the cinema.
Thanks for reading along, and…
P.S. about this year’s race: GO, PARASITE!!! WIN IT ALL!!!!!!!!!!