In Contention

Tag: All About My Mother

  • SHORT TAKE: “The Skin I Live In” (***)

    Cannes Film Festival

    Pedro Almodóvar’s new feature opens with a pause: a beautiful young woman holds a tricky yoga position, her already fine-lathed physique vacuumed into a nude body stocking, stretched across a couch like a pale side of meat hung out for curing. So so taut, so fragile, it seems a simple tap on the shoulder will splinter her perfect form into a chandelier’s worth of glass shards — and that’s an apt note of tension on which to begin “The Skin I Live In,” a coldly kinky thriller in which Almodóvar’s career-long concern with the manipulation and violation of the human body is bent back so far it has nothing left to do but break.

    The girl is actress Elena Anaya; who she’s playing is a question the film keeps in play for far longer than you’d think feasible in a narrative that deftly splits and reshapes identity across a pair of linked tragedies in the life of Antonio Banderas’ demented genius of a plastic surgeon. Adapted — rather liberally, I understand — from Thierry Jonquet’s novel “Tarantula,” the film’s dense structure plays Snakes and Ladders with chronology (a late-film title card that reads “back to the present” drew chuckles in the audience for its apparent self-exasperation), staggering major twists across its running time that makes it a challenge to discuss in any narrative capacity. (It hardly flatters the reviewer’s role to say this, but audiences are better off reading as little about the film as possible before entering the theater: ignorance really is bliss here.)

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 Best Foreign Language Film winners

    John RatzenbergerIt is with a notable silence that Yojiro Takita’s “Departures” – best known to many of you as that film that beat “Waltz With Bashir” to the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar – slipped onto U.S. screens last week. Of course, there are various reasons for the lack of hoop-la surrounding its release.

    The film itself is a decidedly unassuming, low-key effort. The critical reception has been, if hardly hostile, slightly soft. (Sure, Ebert gave it four stars, but what does that mean these days?) Meanwhile, more than three months after Oscar night, it’s likely most people barely remember the film’s victory at all. (Probably a good release strategy, given the dismay with which the win was greeted in many quarters.)

    The less charitable explanation, of course, is that the film isn’t terribly good. Pleasant, certainly, and executed with commendable sincerity, but swaddled in the kind of safe, maudlin cinematic cotton-wool that never threatens any real danger, despite the potentially macabre directions the material could go in. It’s a cozy piece of work that doesn’t dare approach “Waltz With Bashir” for formal invention or “The Class” for storytelling verve.

    As such, it’s a textbook illustration of the Academy’s voting tendencies in this category, which repeatedly favor the safe ahead of the searing: the movie you’d take home to meet Mom rather than the one you’d run away to Paris with. This decade alone, we’ve seen such competent, amiable and relentlessly middlebrow fare as “Nowhere in Africa,” “Tsotsi” and “The Counterfeiters” triumph over infinitely more innovative competition – -or, all too often, films that didn’t even make the nominee list. It’s a situation that inspires annual grumbling, on these pages and innumerable others.

    But it’s not all bad. The running-joke status of the foreign-language award tends to obscure the fact that the Academy has rewarded a number of stone-cold classics in their time too –- never more so than in the earliest days of the award, when titans of film history like Kurosawa, De Sica and Fellini made it to the winners’ podium. And even these days, a gem like “The Lives of Others” can still manages to fight its way to the surface.

    Today’s list seeks to at least partially rehabilitate the reputation of this beleaguered (albeit deservedly so) award, reflecting on the most adventurous –- or simply most resonant -– selections in the 62-year history (including the days when it was merely an honorary citation) of the Best Foreign Language Film award.

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