1991 Winner, Mediterraneo

Mediterraneo

Director:  Gabriele Salvatores

Distributed by:  Miramax Films

Released:  January 1991

Country:  Italy

When I was 12 or so, in the late 70’s, I won First Prize in a local archery contest.  It was a summer day-camp thing, and I represented my school camp in the contest, facing all opposition from the several other school camps in the area.  As reward, they gave me a gift certificate for a sundae at Dairy Queen.  Going into the contest, I was skeptical I would do very well—I knew how to hold the bow and sometimes was even able to hit the target.  But surprisingly, I was able to bring home The Banana Split because when it came time for the big match, it turned out the only other competitor was an 8-year-old kid who had never tried archery before.  I beat him so bad I bet he went home crying for his mommy.  

I haven’t seen any of the other entries for Best Foreign Film in 1991, but my guess is they were not unlike that 8-year-old boy.  Because the winner, Mediterrano, is about as good a movie as I was an archer.

The Italian sailors.  They're zany screw ups.

The film is about a group of screw-up Italian sailors during early World War II.  Their ship gets sunk and they end up on a Greek island that is seemingly abandoned.  They lose radio contact and are stuck in this beautiful little town in the Mediterranean Sea.  The guys search the island and gradually find that the town is not at all abandoned after all, but with most of the men of fighting age off to war, the the residents had all just been hiding out.  The sailors aren’t really sure what more they can do but hang tight and wait for help. 

 

Unlike Gilligan’s group or Tom Hanks in Castaway, the Italian sailors don’t see the urgency of getting rescued.  The townspeople are welcoming, and after a while, most of the Italians like the idea of just staying put rather than fighting again for Mussolini.  There is a church in need of repair, kids that need soccer coaches, and most importantly, pretty single women needing attention, including a prostitute with a heart of gold.  The question is, what will they do when they learn Italy is no longer fighting the Allies?  Will they stay or go back to the land where they belong?

War or sex-starved Greek girls:  Which will they choose?

Mediterreano is technically an anti-war film, pointing to the fact that sitting around having Greek food and Greek women is a whole hell of a lot more fun than shooting at people and getting shot at.  Profound stuff.  The characters were supposed to be comical/zany, I suppose, but I found them all to be a bore.  The movie ends with an unnecessary flash forward to see what our chums are up to many years later, but by that time, I was completely uninterested in them.  If the movie was trying to make some point about the futility of war, it missed the mark way worse than my 8-year-old archery opponent did.

The Title:  The Italians took the word “Mediterranean,” as in the Mediterranean Sea, and Italian-ized it by taking the “an” off and adding an “o” at the end.  Did you need me to tell you that?

The prettiest girl on Tom Hanks' island

The Culture: Perhaps the one positive thing about this movie is the attractiveness of rural Greek life.  The scenery and the thought of doing nothing on a Greek island doesn’t seem too shabby.

Agenda Danger:  This one fails if it has an agenda.  Obviously, the Italians at the beginning of the war were the bad guys, so them taking a few years of the war off seems like a plus.

Best Picture that year:  Silence of the Lambs

Rating:  Skip this movie and go have yourself a banana split.

1992 Winner, Indochine

Indochine

Director:  Régis Wargnier

Distributed by:  Bac Films

Released:  April 1992

Country:  France

Vietnam has a really complicated history.  Similarly, Indochine, a movie set in the 1930’s in what we now call Vietnam, is a really complicated film.  Long before most Americans had even heard of the place, Indochina was a colony of France that consisted of much of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam.   It’s in this setting that we find Élaine Devries, an extremely wealthy single French woman, running her father’s plantation.  When she learns that her Vietnamese friends have died in a plane crash, she makes the decision to raise their orphaned toddler daughter as her own, renaming her Camille.

 

Élaine is played with the air of privileged aloofness by French actress Catherine Deneuve, and the movie centers on Élaine and Camille’s relationship as the girl grows into pretty young Asian woman in the world of her mother’s French aristocracy.   Enter a young French officer, Jean-Baptiste Le Guen, arrogant and ambitious, with an eye for Élaine.  The two have a sexual relationship that is mostly kept under wraps, with Jean-Baptiste being in love with Élaine and Élaine mostly looking to have Jean-Baptiste fill her in . . . on what the current military situation is in Indochina.  Élaine is not a bad person, really, but she is Colonial France personified—not meaning harm to the Vietnamese people that work for her, but probably not understanding that they are not just around to meet her needs.

Camille and Elaine

Years go by.  Camille is now a young woman attending a private school.  One day, while trying to escape, a Vietnamese prisoner is shot and runs into Camille, knocking her unconscious and getting blood all over her neat school uniform.  Who should come to the rescue but Jean-Baptiste, who while attending to her gets a full-on view of her emerging womanhood.  Well, one of her emerging womanhoods.  Camille, as would happen to any girl getting wiped down by a soldier while coming to, falls deep for Jean-Baptiste.  Camille’s a little young at this point, but this incident is going to set up a Mrs. Robinson-Elaine (meaning Elaine from The Graduate, not Élaine played by Deneuve) showdown down the road.

If you think I am giving too much away, think again—I am just scratching the surface of this convoluted, meandering plot.  One theme emerges throughout—French colonialism is on the decline, and will soon be only a memory on which one can make long, confusing movies starring Catherine Deneuve.  The story of Élaine, Camille, and Jean-Baptiste is only a device to show this cultural decline, one that will lead to Japanese occupation and war and Americans evacuating by helicopter off Saigon buildings.  I may be getting ahead of myself there, which is what I wanted to do while watching this.  The movie ends with an unsatisfying epilogue set in 1954, the point at which the French finally did pack up and leave Vietnam.

This movie is not without its merits.  It’s beautifully shot in the imperial city of Hue, the one-time

Jean-Baptiste and Camille

capitol city of Vietnam.  Hue was largely destroyed in the Tet Offensive in 1968, but restoration has been taking place there for many years, and the filmmakers found enough terrific- looking spots to put on film.  The film, of course, features France’s most famous actress, Catherine Deneuve.  She doesn’t look much different in this 1992 film than she did her breakout film, the musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, made almost 30 years earlier.  But unfortunately, looks do not a movie make.  This one felt like a missed opportunity at being meaningful epic on the topic.  Instead, it drifted and lost its way more than once, with no good resolutions.  Kind of like Vietnam itself.

The Title:  Indochina under French rule included Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.  Prior to that, the “Indo” in Indochina included Thailand, Burma, and parts of what are now India. 

The Culture:  This story focuses on the colonialists rather than the native people, so this is about the aristocracy more than the population it exploited.

Catherine Deneuve:  The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Agenda Danger:  Basically your run-of-the-mill class warfare stuff.  A main character or two sees 

the unfairness and oppression that is colonialism, thus justifying the Communist takeover later.  There is nothing that hits you over the head, but the message is basically that the French were exploitative.

Best Picture that year:  Unforgiven

Rating:  There’s little doubt that for the most part the French, and then the Americans, regretted getting involved in Vietnam in the first place.  The Americans in particular went in with good intentions and an optimism that the effort would be worth it.  That’s how I went into watching this film.  And about half-way through, I started thinking of a way to get out of watching the rest, but with honor.  Unfortunately, in the end, what little I got out of it wasn’t worth it.  Just like Vietnam.