Academy Award, Best Foreign Language Film

Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film nominee, 1956 - surely someone's seen this?

High school French class... yeah... or maybe university?? I don't know... I think I'd remember if it was a better movie, but I remember that it didn't suck despite it being a very slow starter.

It's impossible to make a film like this without a grand vision, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet channels his into an innovative and highly enjoyable film. Audrey Tautou creates such a lovable character, and the story is quirky, touching and thought-provoking without being schmaltzy. Great fun to watch over and over, beautifully shot and well-paced, Amelie rightfully became an instant classic, and is film I should have seen long before now.

A truly outstanding film that leaves you with a great deal to digest. It does have its lulls, but the excellent acting and the double-edged sword that is Arcand's script more than make up for it. To the very end, you don't know who to take seriously and who to dislike, and the end result is a moving experience sprinkled with some of the darker comedy you'll ever see on film. It's a great creator of cynics, and while you may think you get what you want with the ending, you may not want what you got. It's brilliant.

Intense, borderline claustrophobic, but all along it felt like something was missing in this film... cinematographically fantastic though, and exciting by times, it's worth watching, but it wasn't the fantastic film I'd heard it was. I still liked it, just an expectation problem I suppose. Still a better than average movie, no question.

An important film to see if not all that good, just barely socially conscious and iconoclastic enough to overcome its lack of a coherent story. This is very sensitive filmmaking and the acting (particularly the child actor Sarala) is quite good, but the film is hard to watch due to its incredibly slow pacing. Stick with it, the second half is good (until the cop-out ending which I won't spoil), but there's just not enough there to overcome the excessive "build-up" of the first half. A letdown, overall.

Visually, this film is amazing, and it has a compelling story that is let out very, very slowly. Brutal in places, not for children, the "adult fairy tale" label fits it quite well - especially the horrific moments befitting the brothers Grimm themselves. A great and chilling escape that I love all the more for the ingrained "Garden of Eden" motifs, a truly original film.

I would hardly be the first to compare Nazi concentration camps to Hell, but this film brought to mind an interesting way to do so: the notion of contrapasso, from Dante's Divine Comedy (the first volume, Inferno, if that wasn't obvious).

Quite simply, contrapasso is when the sinner in Hell is punished by having to continually commit his or her sin for eternity... or at least until enough prayers get the spirit out of Hell and into Purgatory and then Paradise.

The lead character, Sally, is a master counterfeiter, both a criminal and a Jew, and as such he finds himself arrested. The punishment, in a Dantean sense, fits the only one of the two qualifications that is actually a crime: the counterfeiter is doomed to continue counterfeiting.

When Dante and Virgil reached the very depths of Hell and discovered Satan, it was not fiery, but effectively frozen solid, and though incredibly powerful, all Satan could do was flap his wings. This is what circulated the air in the Inferno, and effectively kept the whole system moving. The point? In a Dantean world view, even the greatest evil has a role to play in God's plan.

No, I'm not about to defend the Nazis, I hope you didn't stop reading. Like Oskar Schindler, the master counterfeiter Sally is able to keep a staff and thereby save his workers' lives. Much to the chagrin of Burger, another inmate who can't bear the thought of bankrolling the Nazi's war effort, Sally and his crew print forged British Pound and American Dollar notes simply to stay alive. And so, in a larger sense, printing the money - though aiding an evil force - had a benevolent role to play, as it allowed the group to stay alive until the camp was liberated. And Burger, being a deceiver and continually sabotaging the Dollar project just enough to delay them longer, was also a hero despite his seemingly reprehensible actions making him persona non grata by the end.

(Bit of a spoiler, I know, but Holocaust movies are so depressing already, it's almost unheard of to kill the main character... if you watch a lot of them you generally know that they'll survive.)

Other Holocaust films have moved me more (Fateless) or had a bigger/better production values (Schindler's List), but this might be the one of the best plots among those that that I've seen: the contradiction is exciting, as you spend the whole film unsure if you want them to "crack the Dollar" or not, as neither succeeding nor failing guarantees survival. I also found it interesting that the counterfeiters were first artists, for some would argue that to attempt to make a film about the Holocaust in and of itself is, like counterfeiting money, a perversion of artistic talent.

It always blows me away to see a director entertain the notion of what humanity will do when reduced to its basest level of existence, and in this case, it was the flaws of the counterfeiters that made them human, and separated them from the faceless and automatic Nazis.

A well written and acted film that certainly deserved its Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, one that you can either just watch as a good, straight-forward Holocaust movie, or if you want, think a ton about it - the film lends itself to both approches, and should be on your list.