There’s nothing sillier than the Oscars. Beyond their nominations for this year’s awards, the craftily plotted, apocalyptic vision of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Alexander Payne’s breezy, character-based comedy The Holdovers share one commonality: They are both good. It is preposterous to declare that one is “better” than the other.
There’s nothing sillier than the Oscars. Beyond their nominations for this year’s awards, the craftily plotted, apocalyptic vision of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Alexander Payne’s breezy, character-based comedy The Holdovers share one commonality: They are both good. It is preposterous to declare that one is “better” than the other.
But the annual Academy Awards telecast, this year held on March 10, does the noble job of elevating work that could otherwise be ignored by American moviegoers. This is particularly true if those movies come from outside of Hollywood’s sphere of influence. The Best International Feature Film category (changed in 2019 from the vaguely xenophobic “Best Foreign Language Film”) offers five windows into cultures outside of America’s. Interestingly enough, four of the five this year are made by directors telling stories outside of their own country. All are worth your time.
Before we get to the nominees, though, a clarification. The legal thriller and bona fide hit Anatomy of a Fall, which is one of the 10 nominees for Best Picture, is not up for the International prize. You can blame France for that. Each nation submits one title, and the French committee that determines such things served up the culinary romance The Taste of Things instead. That Juliette Binoche-led picture, which is quite good, failed to make it to the final five. (In addition to Best Picture, Anatomy is also up for Best Director, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing, but will not likely win any; the lack of an International slot is, indeed, un petit scandale!)
The nominee most likely to win the International Oscar is the harrowing Auschwitz-set drama The Zone of Interest, based loosely on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name and directed by British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer. Shot on location in Poland with German dialogue, this is nonetheless a British production and was submitted by the United Kingdom. (The U.K.’s two previous nominees have been in the Welsh language.)
That Zone is also one of the 10 nominees for Best Picture pretty much sews the prize up, but it is important to recognize just how unusual this production is—how it differentiates itself from so many other Holocaust films. The movie is ostensibly a domestic drama about a striving Nazi, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), who scheme to maintain their good position. He is the commandant of history’s most notorious extermination camp; she trims the garden and minds the children at their house literally just over the camp’s wall.
Glazer, raised Jewish in London and who spent time on an Israeli kibbutz in his youth, shot the movie in a replica of the Höss home with stashed cameras running in all rooms, Big Brother-style. The actors improvised, sometimes for an hour at a time, with the crew in the basement, completely out of view. The unspeakable horrors next door are heard but never seen, save for the sinister glow of the camp’s furnace. The movie is edited in unusual ways—even breaking the time barrier—to expose not “the banality of evil” but how banal goals, such as a roomier home with a creek, are sometimes all that is needed to inspire evil.
For decades, artists and thinkers have argued that what Auschwitz represents is the responsibility of humankind at large. Glazer may agree with that, but nevertheless insisted on as much specificity and verisimilitude as possible, all the more remarkable an achievement because he does not speak German.
The nominee likely viewed by the most people is Society of the Snow, which topped Netflix’s “most viewed” counter around the globe when it debuted on the streaming service in January. The film, submitted by Spain, was directed by Barcelona-born J.A. Bayona, who has enjoyed a Hollywood career that includes the dark fantasy A Monster Calls, several episodes of the recent Lord of the Rings series on Amazon, and the middle entry in the Jurassic World trilogy (the one that becomes a bit of a haunted house picture for a spell).
Society tells what is probably the most famous story of modern Uruguay—the shocking string of events that followed the crash of a chartered airplane in the Andes in 1972. Yes, this is the story of the rugby team that survived torturous conditions by resorting to eating the corpses of their fallen comrades. It is a repulsive story, but since it is true, it is only human nature to want to see more.
And see it you do! Bayona, never known for subtlety, shows every gruesome angle of the initial crash, brutal avalanches, starvation, and, eventually, the “sacrament”—as the most Catholic athletes considered it—of the flesh. By the end there’s a shot of everyone hanging out beside a stack of ribs like it’s a barbeque. (This shocking image was taken from an actual existing photo.)
The story of the 16 surviving members of Montevideo’s Old Christians, the name of the rugby team, has been told in several documentaries and also the 1993 Hollywood film Alive, starring such notable Latin American actors as Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton. The new version, some of which was shot on location in the Andes, features actors from Uruguay and Argentina and has Spanish dialogue. As such, it is definitely the one to choose if you want to watch a movie about this grim tale, but just know what meal you are ordering in advance.
The nominee with the most old-guard arthouse cred is Japan’s entry, Perfect Days, directed by German director Wim Wenders. Though the 78-year-old filmmaker is one of the foundational members of the “New German Cinema” movement, with German-language projects like Wings of Desire under his belt, a lot of his work was shot elsewhere, like the deadpan comedy Lisbon Story (in Portuguese), the Cuban music documentary Buena Vista Social Club (in Spanish), and his 1984 American masterpiece Paris, Texas (in English).
Unlike those other films, which share a theme of exploring new lands, Perfect Days is a lived-in Japanese story about a man who has achieved inner harmony through his work for a company that maintains public restrooms. That the movie absolutely succeeds on its own merits is quite poetic and is, in its lowkey way, uplifting, but it’s funny to note that it has its origins in a PR campaign for the Tokyo Toilet project, a public works program sponsored in part by the heir to the Uniqlo fortune.
The movie is deceptively simple; it may seem at first to be about a guy who scrubs toilets all day, but over time its dramatic contours are revealed. (Leading actor Koji Yakusho deserves much of the praise.) Some critics have found the film to be a little naive (a similar charge was hurled at Adam Driver as poet-bus driver in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson), while others recognize it as a summation of the auteur’s entire career.
The nominee ripped most directly from headlines is Italy’s entry, the French- and Wolof-language Io Capitano. Directed by Matteo Garrone, whose previous work includes crime dramas Gomorrah and Dogman, this is an old-school, bleeding-heart, character-driven epic about two teenagers from Dakar, Senegal, who see no opportunities where they are and decide to go to Europe. Despite warnings that the trip isn’t that simple, the two, who are also musicians, think they’ll be sending money back to their families and “signing autographs for white people” in no time.
Naturally, they couldn’t be more wrong, and the journey is one devastating setback after another. Garrone based his screenplay on testimony he collected from African migrants to Europe—an incredibly depressing thing to remember when you want to tell yourself “no, it can’t be that bad.” In addition to the expected physical demands of crossing the Sahara, there are shakedowns at the Mali-Niger border and scoundrels in Libya who lure people into traps where they are tortured for ransom. As well as Senegal and Morocco, the movie is shot partially in Italy—though the European nation is only glimpsed as a sanctuary across the Mediterranean.
Immigration is a controversial topic everywhere, but Garrone found himself with a powerful ally soon after the film was released. Pope Francis screened the movie at the Vatican, which the director cites as a possible reason why there has been little political resistance to his abundantly humanist project.
Lastly, the nominee that wins the distinction of being this critic’s favorite is Germany’s entry, The Teachers’ Lounge. It is directed by Ilker Catak, born in Berlin to Turkish immigrants, and based somewhat on an incident he and his co-screenwriter, Johannes Duncker, observed in their youth. A series of thefts in the titular teachers’ lounge sends a seemingly progressive school into a tornado of accusations, self-doubt, and hypocrisy, all in the tensest way possible.
At the center of the action is a new teacher (herself perhaps an immigrant from Poland, but this is a little vague) who is a paragon of idealism. She looks askance as her superiors enforce a blunt method to goad students to report on one another to expose the culprit and is suspicious when only circumstantial evidence points to a Turkish-German child. (He is soon shown to be innocent, but most everyone was very quick to believe he wasn’t.) Taking matters into her own hands, the new teacher surreptitiously shoots video—in violation of Germany’s intense privacy codes, but maybe she didn’t know that?—that seems, at first, to have caught the thief red-handed.
Her calm but deliberate reporting of her evidence goes off like indoor fireworks, turning the school into a panopticon of recriminations and bad faith. Things get so tense that our virtuous lead character (an outstanding performance by Leonie Benesch) has to breathe into a paper bag—and when she can’t find one, she just uses the liner from the garbage can in the bathroom. (For that brief moment, this becomes a true horror movie!)
The Teachers’ Lounge clearly has a lot to say about the paradoxes—or maybe the better term is duplicity—at root in Germany’s proudly liberal modern society. As cinema for outsiders, though, it is also a first-rate thriller.
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