Oscar upsets

The last two films to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film have both encountered widely divergent responses.  On the one hand rapture, and on the other resentment and dismissal.  As usual the truth of the matter lies somewhere between the extremes.

Departures earned a Metacritic average of 68, in a curious mix of 100s with 50s or less.  Competent middlebrow entertainment, with an intriguing glimpse of odd foreign customs mixed with universal themes, it was a likely choice for Best Foreign Film at the 2009 Oscars, and some embraced it as such.  Other critics resented the award not going to more challenging fare like Waltz with Bashir and The Class, and took that out on this inoffensive nominee from Japan.  Sure, it’s too long and too obvious, but you can’t ignore the appeal of its characters and story, and the inherent fascination of Japanese mortuary rituals, every bit as stylized as tea ceremony.  For cognoscenti perhaps Yojiro Takita’s film is confected too prettily out of familiar faces and themes, but for most the inherent strangeness and dignity of a different culture’s approach to death makes it seem fresh.  The only face I recognized was Tsutomo Yamazaki, recycling his taciturn “noodle cowboy” from Tampopo, as the elder “encoffiner.”  I found the young couple very ingratiating, though the man who plays the failed cellist and apprentice encoffiner apparently has achieved stardom in Japan in very similar roles, and while the woman may strike some as simpering to me she seemed charming and expressive.  The film would definitely be better with twenty minutes of repetition and underlining deleted, but it is hypnotic in its depiction of the ritual of cleansing and dressing the body for burial, however formulaic other parts may be.

The Secret in Their Eyes won the 2010 Oscar, and encountered similar disparagement at the hands of a few critics who felt the award should have gone to The White Ribbon, A Prophet, or Ajami – and once again I find myself in the middle.  The Argentinian Juan José Campanello apparently has directed episodes of Law & Order -- the ubiquitous tv series that I have somehow managed to avoid – so is adept at the mechanics of a legal thriller.  He reaches for more here, and grasps a fair portion.  For an Argentine audience, the shuttling of the story between 1974 and 1999 seems particularly evocative of the Isabel Peron era, but Americans are left free of their own memories to notice the rather unconvincing cosmetic aging of the characters and other artificialities.  But the melding of police procedural with thwarted love story comes off quite well, owing to the appeal and skill of the two leads, Ricardo Darin and Soledad Villamel.  He’s a court inspector, and she’s an upper class, Ivy-educated lawyer who comes in as his boss, and as his lifelong object of yearning.  When he’s retired and she’s become a judge, he brings her a novel he is writing about a 25-year-old rape/murder case.  The story flashes back and forth between the two eras, with bravura scenes like one pursuit set in a soccer stadium and various kinds of hugger-mugger.  The film certainly sustains interest, if not total belief.  It will engage your interest but not change your life, well-done entertainment but not quite art, which those other three nominees decidedly are.  So my opinion again falls somewhere in the vicinity of the Metacritic mean of 81.