Categories One-by-One: International Feature

[criddic3]

If Academy voters see The Zone of Interest and have the same mixed response I had, there could be another winner. But not having the option of nominating either Anatomy of a Fall or Godzilla Minus One, as more popular choices, I think the "important film" will prevail. It even made my own list over Society of the Snow, which subjectively I liked more. So I don't know how many voters will choose it with enthusiasm as opposed to admiration for what it was doing.

[danfrank]

Can I ask: did you watch this at home or on the big screen?

My local AMC theatre. Where Nicole Kidman still won't shut up.

Being put in cringe mode does not make for a good lead-in to a movie.

[Mister Tee]

Can I ask: did you watch this at home or on the big screen?

My local AMC theatre. Where Nicole Kidman still won't shut up.

[Big Magilla]

Ah, yes, Paris, Texas, Wenders' best film bar none.

[mlrg]

Mister Tee wrote
I'm utterly ambivalent about Perfect Days. I find it beautifully composed and shot, and it has some very powerful scenes near the end (one involving the main character's sister is teeming with unspoken resonance).

Can I ask: did you watch this at home or on the big screen? I didn't write about Perfect Days on the review thread but I watched it last week and found it to be a very pleasant experience but when it came time to write out what I liked so much about it all of my thoughts felt trite. I don't think Perfect Days is a terribly profound work ("Then is then, now is now" -- ...sure) but I found it to be a very pleasant meditative experience. It's hard to just make a movie about a job. Just a job. Films are stubbornly three act things but this did feel Groundhog Day-ish to reasonably strong effect for me. That said at the end of the day, I think I would've preferred a movie about an uncle helping his niece with his problems than what we had. I might be in the minority of critical consensus but... I just think those kinds of stories are more what I go to the movies for. It does withhold quite a bit. I was surprised to learn that I was supposed to ascertain that Hirayama was supposed to have a crush on the restaurant server until the end.

Just on a personal level what made it a more impactful was just taking in a film (or film-length experience) about work. Finding beauty in the mundane things in a simple life. I generally like films that don't just cheer on being a cog in an uncaring machine without some larger goal but this one worked for me and was what I needed at that moment in the week.

I won't go to bat strongly for it but it mostly worked for me. I'm supportive of The Teacher's Lounge in this contest. I'm also aware that this is the first Wim Wenders film I've seen in over twenty years. I've only seen The State of Things and Wings of Desire, none of his road movies. I, uh, should get on that.

You should watch Paris, Texas NOW

[Sabin]

Mister Tee wrote
I'm utterly ambivalent about Perfect Days. I find it beautifully composed and shot, and it has some very powerful scenes near the end (one involving the main character's sister is teeming with unspoken resonance).

Can I ask: did you watch this at home or on the big screen? I didn't write about Perfect Days on the review thread but I watched it last week and found it to be a very pleasant experience but when it came time to write out what I liked so much about it all of my thoughts felt trite. I don't think Perfect Days is a terribly profound work ("Then is then, now is now" -- ...sure) but I found it to be a very pleasant meditative experience. It's hard to just make a movie about a job. Just a job. Films are stubbornly three act things but this did feel Groundhog Day-ish to reasonably strong effect for me. That said at the end of the day, I think I would've preferred a movie about an uncle helping his niece with his problems than what we had. I might be in the minority of critical consensus but... I just think those kinds of stories are more what I go to the movies for. It does withhold quite a bit. I was surprised to learn that I was supposed to ascertain that Hirayama was supposed to have a crush on the restaurant server until the end.

Just on a personal level what made it a more impactful was just taking in a film (or film-length experience) about work. Finding beauty in the mundane things in a simple life. I generally like films that don't just cheer on being a cog in an uncaring machine without some larger goal but this one worked for me and was what I needed at that moment in the week.

I won't go to bat strongly for it but it mostly worked for me. I'm supportive of The Teacher's Lounge in this contest. I'm also aware that this is the first Wim Wenders film I've seen in over twenty years. I've only seen The State of Things and Wings of Desire, none of his road movies. I, uh, should get on that.

[anonymous1980]

My personal rankings for this category:

01. Perfect Days
02. Io Capitano
03. Society of the Snow
04. The Zone of Interest
05. The Teachers' Lounge

In the old days of "Academy members MUST see all five and prove it", I think a front-runner like The Zone of Interest could be vulnerable to a more populist/accessible contender which leads to surprise wins in the past. Which one of the other nominees could have pulled this off? Personally, I think Io Capitano could have done it.

[Mister Tee]

The nominees:

Io Capitano
Perfect Days
Society of the Snow
The Teachers' Lounge
The Zone of Interest

This category appears a slam dunk -- in the 10-wide best picture era, no film nominated for best film has ever lost best Foreign/International Film. So, start with, The Zone of Interest wins. It's still worth commenting on the other nominees.

I'd never seen either of the previous film takes on the Andes airplane disaster/survival epic -- the cheapie exploitation from the mid-70s, or the 90s version that stars, bizarrely, Ethan Hawke. Society of the Snow strikes me as a solid, honorable effort. It eschews sensationalism, making the notorious part of the story (the cannibalism) into a simple matter of practicality that's dealt with as delicately as possible. The movie is still a survival/endurance story, far from my genre of choice. But it's a fully respectable film.

Io Capitano isn't, as far as I can tell, a true story, but it feels like it should be one, because, otherwise, why the need to rehash such familiar territory? I've been watching desperate people emigrate past the US border since El Norte, and it doesn't change things much to have the locale shifted to Africa -- the same familiar tropes are all still there: the naive hopes, the untrustworthy brokers, the betrayals and ripoffs, and quite a bit of misery-porn. There is, I guess, some relief in the film's second half, and an I-suppose-uplifting outcome (though the story freezes at a moment of ambiguity that could be prelude to failure). But, essentially, it's that same movie I've seen many times before.

I'm utterly ambivalent about Perfect Days. I find it beautifully composed and shot, and it has some very powerful scenes near the end (one involving the main character's sister is teeming with unspoken resonance). But this film makes Zone of Interest seem action-packed by comparison. About 45 minutes in, watching the main actor start yet another day in precisely the same way, I found myself thinking, Groundhog Day -- but someone on IMDB went me one better: saying it was Groundhog Day if Bill Murray wasn't in on the joke, either. If you (like me) saw the trailer prior to your viewing, you might have expected the plot to be about this recessive man being brought out of his shell by his visiting niece. Well, if it is, it's only in the narrowest sense; the film still withholds far more than it grants. This restraint does have payoffs, especially in that sister scene I mentioned -- you can imagine a film where that situation was more fully dramatized, but I'm not sure if it would have been as powerful. Oh, and let me say, the ending didn't work for me. It was clearly straining to be a wow finish, but 1) it was baldly derivative of Call Me by Your Name's finale; 2) where I felt I knew every thought Chalamet was having in that earlier film, here I had basically no idea what the mood changes meant; and 3) the most remarkable thing to me was that a song from an essentially-forgotten musical of my childhood still endures to underscore a scene in a major movie today.

Had Sabin and okri said about The Teachers' Lounge what they did about Anatomy of a Fall -- that they thought it was fine but didn't understand the enthusiasm -- I'd have had a tougher time arguing. This was a movie that set up its premises in such a way that I could quickly sense the ways things would go to hell for our main character -- how both students and faculty would turn on her, how the administration would fail her, how following procedure would make things worse. It wasn't as doom-laden as, say, The Hunt (there was no dead dog, at least). But I felt the rhythms were kind of predictable...until the climax. The film kind of wrote itself into a corner, and chose to escape by not really having much of an ending....but I found that worked better for me than any finale they might otherwise have chosen. This probably all sounds like I hated the film, which I didn't: I found it engrossing as far as it went. I just felt it was more familiar than I'd anticipated.

And, finally, The Zone of Interest -- which I've written about elsewhere, and which we all know will win, both on merit and on long-time Academy-favored subject matter.