Friday Night at the Movies: Foreign Films
Fri Dec 21, 2007 at 04:44:49 PM PDT
If you see a movie trailer in which nobody speaks except a narrator it is because the movie advertised is in a foreign language. When marketing foreign language films for American audiences studios always try to hide the fact that audiences will have to read subtitles. Every time I go to a foreign film that gets a lot of exposure, I know unsuspecting audience member who didn’t do their homework will bitch and moan that they have to read at the movies. Horror of horrors. I always say the same thing to these people. “If you don’t like it, there’s the door.” Subtitles do not bother me. Ignorant and rude moviegoers do.
So I hope your not afraid of subtitles, because tonight’s list is all foreign language films.
A few semester’s ago, I signed up for a class on foreign language films. I assumed it was a survey course that would focus on many different country’s film output. I was surprised to find the course would only feature films from the Eastern European bloc. I knew nothing of this culture’s cinema, and it was interesting to see how a region dealt with being between Fascist Germany and Communist Russia, and later how they dealt with post-communism. Underground, 1995’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes and directed by Emir Kustirica, manages to address each of these three eras in one long film that plays like an old-school Hollywood farce. Our hero is Blacky, a Serbian communist fighting against the fascists during WWII. He and his second in command, Cmi, bumble their way into being heroes, but the enemy forces Blacky into hiding underground. Cmi stays above ground and convinces Blacky that WWII is still going on long after its end. Blacky continues to build weapons in the basement, and Cmi becomes a prosperous gun runner. Then the Communists relinquish control of the Balkans, and Blacky comes up in the middle of the Balkan war. Underground is surreal as all hell, and tough to find, and very long, but it left an impression on me that has been difficult to shake. It’s worth the effort.
No list of foreign films would be complete without an Akira Kurosawa effort. There are many, but my personal favorite is Rashomon. The central story is simple, a woman was raped and her husband murdered while they were traveling. We do not see this horrible crime happen, but rather, we see each of the principle player’s accounts of what happened. The samurai murderer gives us one account, the wife another, and the dead man another through a medium. Eventually, we get another account from an eyewitness. What is masterful about Rashomon is that none of these accounts mesh. They are all radically different as to how the event in question happened. Who’s telling the truth? Do any of the accounts match the actual occurrence? Kurosawa never tells us, but rather leaves what really happened a completely open question. And, quite honestly, anything with Toshiro Mifune in it is worth seeing. Robert DeNiro learned everything he knows about acting by watching Toshiro Mifune.
2006 was a banner year for Mexican filmmakers. Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro Iñárittu, and Guillermo Del Toro each released critically praised and highly regarded films. Del Toro’s effort is the only one that fits on this list. Pan’s Labyrinth is a masterpiece. It is, at once, the best fantasy, the best horror, and the best political film to come out in a very long time, and it’s in Spanish to boot. It’s a parable about our allegiance to authority, and the lines that no authority can ask us to cross. It’s only been out for a year, and it’s already a classic.
The Vanishing is a Dutch film that was later remade and Americanized later on, with Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland. Avoid that one at all costs. The original is a taut, terrifying thriller about man investigating his girlfriend’s disappearance. We know what happened to her throughout the entire movie. She fell victim to a serial killer. The man that killed her is an important character in the movie. He is a good husband and father who just happens to come up with the perfect scheme for killing people. We see him practice his crime and we see him carry it out, but we never see him kill anybody. The girlfriend simply vanishes. The question most on the mind of her boyfriend isn’t really “who killed her,” but rather “how did she die?” In order to find out, the boyfriend submits himself to the killer. The ending, therefore, is telegraphed. Boyfriend does something incredibly stupid, and gets killed for it. But the method of death is horrifying in an order of such magnitude it still comes as a surprise. A terrifying, unforgettable surprise.
I could go on and on, but I’ll save some for the comments.
