2022 Winner, All Quiet on the Western Front

 

All Quiet on the Western Front

Director: Edward Berger

Distributed by: Netflix

Released: September 2022

Country: Germany

Shortly after the beginning of the war in October 1914, the Western Front became bogged down in trench warfare. At the end of the war in November 1918, the front line had barely moved. More than three million soldiers died here, often while fighting to gain only a few hundred metres of ground. During the First World War, almost 17 million people lost their lives.

Sorry for the spoiler, but this text is how Germany’s All Quiet on the Western Front closes. If the filmmakers had just written this at the beginning, it would have saved me and all the viewers a whole lot of time and effort. Even better, had the enemies in The Great War had this information before the power keg of Europe blew, think of the number of lives saved. 

This 2022 BFF winner is based on the 1923 Erich Maria Remarque novel many of us were forced to read in high school (or get the Cliffs Notes, ha ha, just kidding Fr. Streicher). I have never seen the 1930 American version of this story, but while it won an Oscar for Best Picture, I would have no problem believing the German film is much better in a lot of ways. The trouble is, our 2022 version was made over 100 years after the end of the war, which sort of takes the zing our of the point of the film, which is, of course, to paraphrase American Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, war is no bueno.

The story follows 17-year-old Paul, a naive kid who forges his parents’ signature to be able to enter the German army in 1917. Paul and his pals can’t wait to get to the front and kick France’s ass. It takes about 10 minutes after getting there for them to realize trench warfare isn’t quite as glorious as their schoolmaster had made it out to be. One of the chums, Ludwig, even cries on the first night that all he wants to do is go home. But the only way Ludwig is going home is in a body bag (I’m pretty sure they didn’t have body bags in 1917, but you get the gist).

Ferdinand Foch at the signing of the Armistace

The war drags on and the deaths pile up. Paul and his comrades engage in the kinds of things one does during wartime—scrounge for food, dream of women, talk of what they’ll do when they get back home. An older soldier, Kat, latches on to the group, a wise though illiterate man. Paul worries that the war has changed him, that life will never be the same after all he has seen. Unlike educated Paul, Kat knows getting out of this thing alive is the objective—everything else is gravy.

Simultaneously, we see the big shots behind lines working behind the scenes. On the one hand, German officials know the war is lost and are going to have to stomach some bad terms. The French coalition, led by Gen. Ferdinand Foch, are uncompromising and haughty (this is a German-made film, after all); the Germans, led by the more reasonable Matthias Erzberger (and played by Daniel Brühl, who viewers may remember from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds in a less sympathetic role), have no choice but to sign a bad deal. All the while, like in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, another WWI film, the military leadership remain impervious to the sufferings of the grunts, only concerned about personal glory and fruitless ideations.

Daniel Bruhl, Inglorious Basterds

There is much to admire in this film about WWI, a conflict that seems to have been somewhat resurrected in film with Sam Mendes’s 1917 (from 2019) and Peter Jackson’s 2018 documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. More stylish and gruesome than these films, All Quiet on the Western Front draws you in and has you rooting for these ill-fated German kids. Particularly integral to the style is German composer Volker Bertelmann’s Oscar Award winning-score. Like John Williams’s remarkably simple theme from Jaws, the music here consists of only a few notes—from a distorted bass—that alert the viewer that what is coming next isn’t good. Tragedy will come from an ill-fated charge from the trenches or from the delusional words of a German general who on the last day still thinks sending the boys to fight and die is a noble undertaking.

The Title: German: Im Westen nichts Neues. Literally, In the West, nothing new.  Nothing new, indeed.

Culture: If there is one truism of History, it’s that one thing leads to another. World War I didn’t come out of nowhere and aptly serves as the run-up to the war that started in 1939. All Quiet provides a bit of a window into the wartime zeitgeist of the new-ish country that was Germany in the early twentieth century, from the rush of patriotism to the gut-punch of defeat in 1919, particularly in that train car where the armistice agreement was signed.

Agenda danger: This is what we call the classically anti-war film, plain and simple. And do we really need another anti-war film, even if is is a really well-made one? This 147-minute movie can be summed up in a simple Pink Floyd lyric:

Forward he cried from the rear and the front line died.

The general sat while the lines on the map moved from side to side.

Best Picture that year: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Rating: Recommended if you are trying to figure out if you are pro- or anti-war, or if you are in high school and would rather skip reading the novel.

2019 Winner, Parasite

Parasite

Director: Bong Joon-ho

Distributed by: CJ Entertainment

Released: May 2019

Country: South Korea

Parasite is a tale of two families, and of two (at least) genres: The families are the Kims and the Parks. The Kims—father, mother, brother, sister—are intelligent, resourceful, and seem to genuinely love each other. The Parks are a bit more of a mixed bag: A father who is a bit self-indulgent and doesn’t really respect his wife; an attractive mother who is a bit ditzy and superficial; a teenage sister who seems like a bit of a brat; and a young brother who apparently sees ghosts. The main difference, though, is that the Parks have Bill Gates money and live in a beautiful home with servants on call to do everything for them, while the Kims live in a basement, making money folding pizza boxes, and trying to steal wi-fi from their neighbors and free pest control by opening their windows when the exterminator sprays the streets.

The Kims

The thing is, though, the Kims are crooked, dishonest, and ruthless. The story begins when a friend of the brother tells him he is going abroad to study. He asks the brother to take over with the tutoring of the 14-year old Park girl, since the friend thinks the brother wouldn’t be able to successfully put the moves on the cute but underage Park girl.  See, he plans to do just that in the near future, once she's old enough. Brother Kim gets the help of his artistic sister, who is handy at creating false documents, to get his credentials and scam his way into a job. After that, one by one, the others in the Kim family scheme their way into positions as well: the sister as the therapist for the little Park boy; Dad becomes the chauffeur; and for Mama Kim, the housekeeper job. One night, while the Parks are away on a camping overnight, the Kims have a little drink-fest to celebrate their new situation, working as a family in a dream home.  It's all been too easy.

The film’s first third is mostly comic—you’ll root for the Kims as anti-heroes, enjoying the ride of how they get where they get. But things turn glum when rain forces the Parks to cut their camping trip short, calling home to say they’ll be home in a few. From here on, the movie is more dramatic thriller, starting with the Kims hustling to clean the place like a teenager getting rid of the empties and assorted smells before Mom and Dad get back from their vacation. Here we find the plot thicken, with twists you don’t see coming and aspects of the characters that may change your perceptions of them.

The Park house

Parasite takes its time in letting the plot develop and allows you to get a good look at each member of the Kim family in its own time. The Parks, on the other hand, tend to be on the verge of stereotype, rich people who either lack empathy or brains. Walking out of the film, I got to thinking—are we supposed to favor the Kims over the Parks? The Parks really do seem to be decent people who just don’t appreciate what poverty is. The Kims are struggling and obviously have the resourcefulness that rich people like the Parks don’t have. Yet they don’t seem to care who they hurt to get what they want. In the end, I think the filmmaker isn’t aiming for you to dislike the Parks or the Kims, but the economic system that predestines where they are. It’s that system, one in which one group has to live off the other (like parasites), that is up for criticism.

The Title: 기생충 Director Bong Joon-ho explains: "Because the story is about the poor family infiltrating and creeping into the rich house, it seems very obvious that Parasite refers to the poor family, and I think that's why the marketing team was a little hesitant," he explained. "But if you look at it the other way, you can say that rich family, they're also parasites in terms of labor. They can't even wash dishes, they can't drive themselves, so they leech off the poor family's labor. So both are parasites." I dunno, sounds a bit Marxian for me, but I see what he's saying.

Parasite family, Magoo-style

Culture: Parasite portrays what Koreans call the Hell Joseon, a term to describe the economic concept of the vast gap between the have and the have-nots, and the have-nots' inability to become part of the haves, despite hard work. The grandeur and the modernity of the house in which the Parks live hearkens to Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle home (which the French 1958 film mocked), with all the conveniences a modern-day homemaker like Mama Park can enjoy. Despite a torrential downpour, the home seems safe and sound, even for a backyard tent sleepover. Meanwhile, the squalor and uncleanliness of the Kims’ basement home suffers disaster because of weather conditions.

Agenda danger: There’s no pretense that this story is about class conflict and the perceived widening gap between rich and poor in South Korea. Of course as bad as things may be, South Korea only need to look north to see how it could be worse. That said, it seems to me the Academy, made up of those firmly in the have rather than have-not camp, bought the message, or at least wanted to reward a film about class conflict.

Best Picture that year:  Well, Parasite. The first Best Foreign Film (officially, now the Best International Feature Film) to win the overall Best Picture Oscar.

Rating:  I liked the comedy part of this film more than the suspense and social commentary, and I enjoyed all the performances. It’s an entertaining film with an great storyline, even if disbelief has to be firmly suspended at the door. 1917 was a better overall film, but this one ranks high on the list of foreign language films.

My BFF Wrap-Up: My Ranking

Starting in June 2016, I watched and reviewed every winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, or in short, Best Foreign Film (BFF), in reverse chronological order from the 2015 entry to the awards inception in 1947 (watching the 2016 winner at the end).  Part of the experiment was to see how many of these I would be able to find.  In most cases, I was able to borrow the DVD of each film from the Cuyahoga County Library system (a consistently top rated system in Northeast Ohio), and as things went further back in time, that meant using the inter-library systems CCL employs, SearchOhio and OhioLINK.  I did have to watch a couple on the dusty old VCR.  On two or three occasions when I couldn’t find the movie through the CCL system, I was able to get DVDs from the Cleveland Public Library.  Once I paid $2 to watch a movie on Amazon, and that was the grand total of money I spent on this project.  I did find a couple rare films online, having exhausted every other possibility.  Only once was I not able to find a film at all, at least with English subtitles, and that was 1950’s The Walls of Malapaga.  I watched it only in French with Portuguese subtitles, and decided to review it anyway.

My reviews were intended for people who don’t normally watch foreign films, a group that included me not all that long ago.  I found a lot of the movies worth watching, not just ones you might see at an art house, but movies I am convinced would have been mainstream American favorites had they been in English.  I also sat through a lot of tedious, self-admiring crap that got awards for having the right political or social view to the voters of the Academy.  But enough about The Sea Inside.  My goal was to make the reviews be entertaining, especially when the movie wasn't, and to give American viewer something they could relate to.

The list here is my amateurish attempt to rank what is perhaps the unrankable.  There are a variety of genres and so many different cultures represented here that it is almost unfair to compare them against each other.  But I did anyway, and the films are listed below from best to worst.  Click any movie title to read the review.  You can follow me on Twitter at @hawley5150.   

Enjoy!

1989, Cinema Paradiso, Italy

2006, The Lives of Others, Germany

1951, Rashomon, Japan

1998, Life Is Beautiful, Italy

1957, La Strada, Italy

1949, The Bicycle Thief, Italy

2011, A Separation, Iran

1975, Dersu Uzala, Soviet Union

1967, Closely Watched Trains, Czechoslovakia

1947, Shoeshine, Italy

1964, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Italy

1963, 8½, Italy

2009, The Secret in Their Eyes, Argentina

1972, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, France

1983, Fanny and Alexander, Sweden

1962, Sundays and Cybele, France

1965, The Shop on Main Street, Czechoslovakia

1986, The Assault, The Netherlands

2000, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Taiwan

1987, Babette's Feast, France

1960, The Virgin Spring, Sweden

2002 Nowhere in Africa, Germany

1958, My Uncle, France

1971, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Italy

1968, War and Peace, Soviet Union

1957, Nights of Cabiria, Italy

2007, The Counterfeiters, Austria

1974, Amarcord, Italy

1952, Forbidden Games, France

 
1961, Through a Glass Darkly, Sweden

2014, Ida, Poland

2016, The Salesman, Iran

1948, Monsieur Vincent, France

2008, Departures, Japan

2015, Son of Saul, Hungary

1970, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Italy

1985, The Official Story, Argentina

1969, Z, Algeria

1966, A Man and a Woman, France

1973, Day for Night, France

1990, Journey of Hope, Switzerland

1980, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, Soviet Union

1982, Begin the Beguine, Spain

1993, Belle Époque, Spain

1959, Black Orpheus, France

1992, Indochine, France

1988, Pelle the Conqueror, Denmark

2005, Tsotsi, South Africa

1977, Madame Rosa, France

1981, Mephisto, Hungary

1954, Gate of Hell, Japan

2010, In a Better World, Denmark

1955, Samurai, The Legend of Musashi, Japan

2001, No Man's Land, Bosnia and Herzegovina

1976, Black and White and in Color, Ivory Coast

1979, The Tin Drum, West Germany

1996, Kolya, Czech Republic

1994,  Burnt by the Sun, Russia

1978, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, France

2012, Amour, France

2013, The Great Beauty, Italy

1997, Character, Netherlands

2014, The Sea Inside, Spain

1995, Antonia's Line, Netherlands

2003, The Barbarian Invasions, Canada

1991, Mediterraneo, Italy

1984, Dangerous Moves, France

1999, All About My Mother, Spain

1950, The Walls of Malapaga, France/Italy (not ranked)

FINE!