Winner of Best Foreign Film 2012 - Amour

9/14/13 Amour, Best Foreign Language Film, 2012

Amour is one of those movies you want to see because you've heard great reviews, but you don't want to see because of the story line, so you hem and haw, and then jump in so you can cross it off your list. So, it is off my list, and it is very good. So it's in French, that's what subtitles are for, get over it. It was nominated in five major categories, including Best Actress, Best Director, Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film, winning for Best Foreign Film. Amour is the story of Anne and Georges, an elderly couple in Paris. Anne suffers a stroke and the movie follows her gradual decline, and how Georges struggles to take care of her. There are no real surprises in the movie, but it doesn't pretend to be full of suspense, it simply tells the story of two people, still in love, dealing with the eventuality that is old age. Having seen first hand how devastating a stroke can be to the patient and the family, the movie was hard to watch, and yet it was somehow comforting to have it represented with honesty and love. Emmanuelle Riva was nominated for Best Actress, and she certainly gave an incredible performance, especially considering that for a lot of the movie she was really immobile and communicating with very few words. She lost to Jennifer Lawrence, and now having seen all the nominees, I think Jessica Chastain should have won for Zero Dark Thirty. From a film perspective, it was hard to believe that Amour was directed by Michael Haneke, the same man who directed The White Ribbon (2009 nominee for Best Foreign Language Film for Germany). The White Ribbon is dark, and eerie and taps into the darker side of human nature. Then again, maybe the fact the Haneke can tap into the very best and the very worst of human relationships is the link, and it's not so hard to believe.

I have also seen all the Foreign Language nominees except one (War Witch and that should arrive next week), and I think this was the best out of the four I saw, although I did like the Danish entry A Royal Affair which is based on the romance between Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (wife of King Christian VII) and Streunsee, the royal physician. We don't get a lot of Danish history in American movie theaters and I liked the novelty of that, and it's a great story. Kon-Tiki is about the 1947 voyage led by Thor Heyerdahl (not to be confused with the actually documentary about the same journey which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1951). Heyerdahl is trying to prove his theory that people from South America could have settled in Polynesia. Considering that this trip really happened, it was interesting to see how it might have transpired, although there were some changes for dramatic effect. My only complaint is the version of the movie I saw was almost all in English, when I thought it would be (or had to be for this category) in Norwegian. That aside, the film was beautifully shot. If you have any kind of interest in adventures of this kind and appreciate the spirit of the adventurer, I totally recommend this movie. No was the Chilean entry about the campaign to oust General Augusto Pinochet in 1988. I thought the topic was interesting, but I could not get into the movie, which is a shame. The events in the 1970s and 1980s in South America (Chile, Argentina, and other countries) were in part directed by or contributed to by the US government, and depending on what else is going on in history class, we don't learn a lot about them.