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!

1962 Winner, Sundays and Cybele

Sundays and Cybele

Director:        Serge Bourguignon

Distributed by:  Columbia Pictures

Released:  November 1962

Country:  France

In the movies, it’s very common to see love stories in which the man is significantly older than the woman.  Somehow it doesn’t seem as unrealistic as it is in real life—imagine some grandpa who looks like Humphry Bogart (56) ending up with a young girl who looks like Audrey Hepburn (25)—it of course happened in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954).  Honestly, it would probably be weird to see a post-1980 movie with Jack Nicholson hooking up with anyone in his general age bracket.

1962’s Best Foreign Film Sundays and Cybele gives us a relationship in which the age difference is a little more on the unacceptable side, with the guy in his mid-30’s and the girl being a lot younger.  As in 12-years-old.  Now that’s weird.  But this movie isn’t like Lolita, the Stanley Kubrick dark comedy of the same year.  Oddly enough, the man in this relationship, Pierre, isn’t a perv like the old man in that book by Nabakov, and this is definitely not a comedy but an out-and-out tragedy.

Pierre and Cybele

The film starts with an action scene:  Pierre is a fighter pilot in Indochina (now Vietnam, and the subject of 1992’s Best Foreign Film winner, Indochine, starring Catherine Deneuve), flying over a small village and finding he will have to crash land right on a little Vietnamese girl.  We next see Pierre back in France some time later, having a pretty nurse girlfriend, Madeleine, but greatly damaged by his past.  He doesn’t really remember who he is and despite Madeleine’s best efforts, it seems he’s lost his sexual mojo.  But in 1962 France they don’t have Viagra or side-to-side-bathtubs, so Madeleine, faithfully in love with the vacant Pierre, has to take up knitting or kick boxing to work out her frustrations.  She has a male doctor colleague, Bernard, who is more than willing to step into the adjoining tub with her.

But the main focus is on Pierre.  Pierre meets a little girl, Cybele, who is being dumped by her father into a convent to be raised.  It seems the dad was stuck with her somehow and wants nothing to do with her.  Pierre learns of this and feels bad for his new friend.  He poses as her father and picks her up one day so that she can have some time away from her new hated home.  Soon, they make it a regular thing, with Pierre taking her to the park and hanging out and chatting with her for hours every Sunday.

Pierre and Madeleine

He is very innocent about it, no creepy hugs or lingering looks or anything icky like that.  Still, this is a romance of sorts—Cybele calls Pierre her fiancé and he gets intensely jealous when he sees another 12-year old, a boy, chatting with her.  As clueless as he is, Pierre knows to conceal the relationship from Madeleine.  Still, they are out in public all the time, so you know this isn’t going to end well.

Sundays and Cybele is really a sweet movie, and you cannot help hoping for the best for these two lovebirds.  It’s not Pierre’s fault where he is mentally, and Patricia Gozzi as Cybele is such a charming and intelligent girl, it seems odd any father would want to dump her off at a convent.  Hardy Krüger plays Pierre perfectly, a completely sympathetic figure having a relationship that would seem so abhorrent to an outsider.  French composer Maurice Jarre, who won an Oscar for Best Score for Lawrence of Arabia that same year, was also nominated for “Best Music, Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment” for Sundays and Cybele.

"Grandpa, you smell like whiskey and cigars"

The Title:  Les dimanches de Ville d'Avray (Sundays in Ville d'Avray).  Ville d’Avray in the suburb where Pierre takes Cybele to hang out every week.

The culture:  France was out of Vietnam after 1954, when Dien Bien Phu fell, so this must take place sometime in the early 1950’s.  Given Pierre’s state after his crash, this movie can be construed to be one of the earliest anti-Vietnam war movies, in a way.

Agenda danger:  Whatever your view on the vast changes in the past decade or less on American views on sexuality and appropriate relationships, the views on pedophilia largely remain unchanged.  This movie is not an attempt at normalizing this kind of relationship.  The point is, Pierre is really a child like Cybele, and Cybele needed someone who cared about her. 

Best Picture that year:  Lawrence of Arabia

Rating:  The story is as unique as the relationship between Pierre and Cybele.  Honestly, I didn’t much buy into Pierre’s relationship with Madeleine, as it didn’t really make sense to me why she was with him in the first place.  But as potentially disturbing as relationship between the adult man and girl is, they both were realistic about who they were.  Cybele talks about them getting married years from now, when they are both of appropriate age, and for his part, Pierre seems to never have an untoward thought about her in his head.  For my money, their relationship seemed a lot more likely than Grandpa Bogart and fresh-out-of-cooking-school Sabrina.