Oscar Horrors: 'The Virgin Spring'

Oscar Horrors continues with Beau and his favorite filmmaker.

HERE LIES... Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for 1960.

I'm not going to beat around the bush here. Let's just get right to it. Ingmar Bergman is my favorite filmmaker of all time. He's self-indulgent, woefully meandering, and I love him for it. I first watched The Seventh Seal when I was all of eighteen, and the imagery and gallows humor wowed me. I pursued the rest of his respective oeuvre like a feverish animal, devouring early works and late masterpieces with the rabid enthusiasm of a junkie who just discovered Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg on the same day.

That being said, The Virgin Spring was a strange one for me. A meditation on the convoluted, considerable blindness of faith at odds with the cold, ruthless foundation of nature by way of a virginal sacrifice? Oh no, Ingmar, no. Don't worry about imbuing levity here dude, we cool.

While all of his films have resonated since first viewing, The Virgin Spring was peculiar for the fact that you sensed he wasn't entirely being himself... 

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LFF: "Quartet" and Other Misguided Lovers

David here reporting on a diverse selection of films showing at the 56th BFI London Film Festival starting with the Best Actress hopeful Quartet...

Tom Courtenay and Maggie Smith in 'Quartet'

“Like being hugged by your favourite grandparent,” I wryly tweeted just after exciting the press screening of Quartet. Imagine that. It’s an undeniably pleasant experience, even as it might come with a slightly musty smell and a worry that if you let go they’ll lose their balance. (Said grandparent must obviously have reached a certain age, and I’m sure your grandmother smells lovely really.) Quartet is, in the nicest way possible, an elderly person’s movie – gentle, undemanding, exceedingly pleasant and just a little bit bland. Every piece of the easy narrative jigsaw puzzle is placed before you within fifteen minutes – Cissy (Pauline Collins) winsomely forgets where she’s going several times, Reggie (Tom Courtenay) withdraws bitterly at Jean’s (Maggie Smith) arrival, and Dr. Cogan (Sheridan Smith) happens to mention that the nursing home is in danger of closing down. Not to mention that this collective of aging musical greats are already rehearsing for their gala concert in honour of Verdi’s birthday. Continue...

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LFF: Wadjda, A Miracle Debut

David here with words on a milestone in film history showing at the 56th BFI London Film Festival.

Waad Mohammad as 'Wadjda'

Miracles do happen. Haifaa Al-Mansour’s debut feature Wadjda is one of them. The first film to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, where movie theatres are illegal, Wadjda is also the first film ever made by a Saudi woman. As the film shows, gender equality is still non-existent in Saudi Arabia – Reem Abdullah’s working mother relies on a driver to ferry her to work every day and Wadjda (Waad Mohammad) is omitted from her father’s family tree. Despite these socio-political outrages, Wadjda is never aggressive or dogmatic about getting any agenda across to its audience. Focusing its energies on the “spunky” young heroine of the title, Wadjda stitches the injustice and sexism that’s at the heart of Saudi Arabian society into the larger canvas of Wadjda’s rebellious spirit and complex engagement with religion. [Continue...]

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Oscar Horrors: Dogtooth

HERE LIES... my soul. Well, our souls, after we all subjected ourselves to Yorgos Lanthimos’s mad genius in Best Foreign Film nominee Dogtooth.

Let’s go back a couple of years to January 25th 2011: nomination day for the 83rd Oscars. As per tradition, a shortlist of nine films in contention for the Best Foreign Language film had been released previously and it’s a big understatement to simply say eyebrows were raised when Dogtooth was included among them. Granted, the Greek submission was exactly the type of film that the executive committee was intended to save and the submissions weren’t really a vintage crop, but there were still films like France’s universally admired Of Gods and Men and Turkey’s Golden Bear winner Honey in the running. In any case, the January shortlist was presumed to be the extent of Dogtooth’s progress. Surely, the same group of people who found Departures superior to The Class, or The Secret in their Eyes stronger than The White Ribbon, wouldn’t go for something as outré as Dogtooth, would they?

It turns out, they would!

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NYFF: "Amour" & "No" Are Worthy Oscar Contenders

The Oscar race for Best Foreign Language Film is particularly exciting this year. We have more contenders than ever (71!) and so many strong films that the Academy's always controversial foreign language branch will undoubtedly piss various contingencies off when they announce the finalist list and then the nominees. They could lessen the size of the outcry each year if only their finalist list were 12 films long. It's so strange that they make it small enough (9 films) that those films which miss the nomination are in the minority and, thus, look particularly snubbed... numerically speaking. I've already raved about the Pinoy movie "Bwakaw", and here are two other worthy candidates for this annual honor. Don't miss them if you get a chance to see them

AMOUR (Austria)
“Ladies and Gentlemen, people die. That’s all you need to know.” This line, a recurring catchphrase from aging chanteuse Kiki (Justin Bond) in the now departed Kiki & Herb act, used to make me howl with laughter. It was a perfect punchline, soaked as it was in booze and tragicomic matter-of-factness. People do die. Death is a fact of life but we spend so much time denying it that it often feels completely abstract, an imagined fate rather than an eventual one. But as Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), the elderly woman at the heart of Michael Haneke’s new film reminds us:

Imagination and reality have little in common.”

At first Haneke keeps his customary distance. Were it not for early publicity or the disturbing pre-title sequence that shows us a woman's decomposing body surrounded by flowers, we wouldn't even know who the principle characters were during the post-title opening shot, a crowd watching a piano recital. As in the finale of Haneke's best film (Caché) the director doesn't help you decide where to look; it's your job to find the narrative. But one of the strongest directorial impulses in Amour is Haneke's barely perceptible but undeniably tightening focus on the couple. Each scene seems to bring us closer to Anne and Georges (Jean-Louis Trigninant), a happy well-off couple in their eighties who enjoy literature, cultural events, and visits from their daughter (Isabelle Huppert) and Anne's former student (the pianist Alexandre Tharaud who appears to be playing himself). The first close-ups of note, an utterly captivating shot/reverse shot of the couple as Anne all but vanishes from a conversation in progress, is the bomb dropping...

Michael Haneke with his actors on the set of "Amour"

I don’t want to go on”

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