The Ardennes

Robin Pront's The Ardennes is not worth watching. This was advertised as somehow related thematically or cinematically to Bullhead. But Bullhead this ain't. This is just a generic Euro crime thriller with nothing else to say for itself. No thanks.

Telluride at Dartmouth #3

Last night's movie was called Rust and Bone and it will not be France's official selection for the Foreign Language Oscar. The film in competition will be Olivier Nakache & Eric Toledano's Intouchables.

And, frankly, who cares, because Rust and Bone is an excellent picture, no matter what kind of crowdpleaser the French Film Academy selects.

What is important for you to know is that the Jacques Audiard – the director of Un Prophète, Sur Mes Lèvres, and De Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arrêté – has made another tough-as-nails picture about working-class people trying to make their way in a world that doesn't want them to succeed. Rust and Bone is about a pugilist with a young son and his affair with a woman who trains killer whales in a Sea-World-like theme park.

The boxer is played by the awesome Matthias Schoenaerts (who was in Bullhead from earlier this year and whose praises I've been singing), and the orca-trainer is played by Marion Cotillard.

Rust and Bone is a plot-heavy drama, filled with reversals, and knowing nothing about the movie, I was constantly surprised by what happened as the film moved forward. I don't think Rust and Bone is quite as extraordinary of a picture as Un Prophète, but Audiard is an excellent storyteller, and he loves his characters, even when they make terrible decisions.

Audiard's films are also always concerned with class and with the material situation of his characters. They do what they do because of the tight financial constraints placed upon them and he never lets an audience forget that about his characters.

I don't want to spoil anything about the plot, so I'll be quiet about what happens, but I can say with confidence that both Schoenaerts and Cotillard are superb in Rust and Bone. Cotillard proves, again, that she is a serious actor that demands attention, and Schoenaerts is plainly an actor who is here to stay. Bullhead was not a flash-in-the-pan performance. This guy is fantastic.

Bullhead

For a while, as I was watching Michaël Roskam's Bullhead, I thought that the film I was watching was a kind of artfully done melodrama – something like Götz Spielmann's Revanche, which got lots of great reviews and which I liked but didn't quite love. And for a while, Bullhead is precisely that: an artfully made melodrama.

And then something breaks in the film, or lurches. Roskam's film is able to describe – in a moment that I found totally unexpected and in clear filmic language – an event that is horrific and unspeakable. It is an event that is small, really, but which has an absolutely enormous emotional impact. This is something that will stay with me for a long time.

This event, however, doesn't really change the way that the film is attempting to function, and Bullhead stays a kind of melodrama, a film about a man's suffering and his inability to make his life work. The characters in the film's present day are all the same as the characters in the film's flashback sequences; they're just twenty years older now. It's a narrative we've seen before: young man cannot reconcile his own past; his past comes back to haunt him anyway.

Bullhead is also a crime thriller, a story about gangsters. And the flashback sequences, which happen quite early in the film, give us a backstory that makes whatever is to come  in the movie feel completely unpredictable. This is a man whose motives we do not understand, whose pain we cannot comprehend, whose actions we cannot anticipate. It makes the main character (his name is Jacky, but the police surveillance team calls him "Rundskop" / "Bullhead" in Flemish Dutch) absolutely terrifying. He's not scary in a traditional way either. He's scary rather like Ryan Gosling is in Drive – although this character is more lost, more confused, simply more stupid than Drive's protagonist.

Matthias Schoenaerts is absolutely phenomenal. I loved this character, and yet I knew he would do the wrong thing while trying to do the right thing. I never knew what he was going to do next, but I wished I could help him. This is a man who is simply caught in a trap – like so many cattle being led to slaughter. (The bulls are a central metaphor in Bullhead, but their metaphoric presence never overpowers, never feels contrived.)

And then, all of a sudden, Roskam's film is so much more than a simple or even a complex melodrama. It becomes clear in act three that everything from the film's first two acts was all about class. The people who carry the guns are the people in power, sure, but power differentials in mafia circles work in similar ways to power differentials in places like chic Belgian clubs where the owner makes you buy a dress shirt at the door or boutiques devoted entirely to luxuries like perfume.

Bullhead is a film made in Flanders, and the movie nods explicitly to the old tradition of Flemish landscape painting. Think of work like this:

Roskam shoots these kinds of landscapes (complete with bovine inhabitants) as a backdrop to his scenes with his protagonist, and each time he does this it felt to me as though he was recalling a history of the land in which his story took place. These views struck me not as nostalgic ways of looking at Flanders but rather as images of the Flanders that we think we know – tourist images from the history of European painting. The rest of the film is a battleground, filled with unimaginable violence and unexpected brutality.

I don't want to spoil Bullhead any more than I already have – and my narrative here omits the other character, le doulos, who is central to the film's story – but I want also to say that this film's ending is just superb. I needed to take a walk outside after it was over.

If you can handle the violence, I cannot recommend this film enough.

2012's Nominees: Part 9 of 10

W Ciemności (In Darkness)

1 Nomination

• Foreign Language Picture: Poland (Katyń, Man of Iron, Young Girls of Wilko, Nights and Days, The Deluge, Promised Land, Pharaoh, Knife in the Water)

Director: Agnieszka Holland

Cast: Robert Wieckiewicz, Benno Fürmann, Agnieszka Grochowska, Maria Schrader, Herbert Knaup.

The older films that represented Poland with the Oscars have mostly been directed by the great Andrzej Wajda (Katyń, Man of Iron, Young Girls of Wilko, and Promised Land). Knife in the Water, the classic Polanski film, also has made an appearance in this category, before he started working in English with Repulsion. I didn't really realize Agniezska Holland was still making films in Poland. Her film Europa Europa was nominated for Original Screenplay back in 1992, and her Angry Harvest was nominated for Foreign Language Picture (for West Germany) in 1986. Since then she has been directing for The Wire and Treme, excellent credits to be sure. If any film this year can unseat favorite A Separation, it will be this one – WWII has been a favorite subject matter for this category for years.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Foreign Language Picture

My Rating: Not ranked

Rundskop (Bullhead)

1 Nomination

• Foreign Language Picture: Belgium (Everybody's Famous!, Farinelli, Daens, The Music Teacher, Peace in the Fields)

Director: Michaël R. Roskam

Cast: Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeroen Perceval, Jeanne Dandoy, Barbara Sarafian, Tibo Vandenborre.

This is only Belgium's sixth nomination. Historically, this country has succeeded by choosing period pieces/costume dramas (all of the films above except for Everybody's Famous! took place before 1930), and they have traditionally been Francophone films, as well. Bullhead is in both French and Dutch, and is set in contemporary Belgium. Lately the Academy has been happy to nominate exciting films and movies about violence, but they don't seem to want to give them the Oscar when it comes down to it. Still, the Oscar nomination hopefully means that people actually get out to see Bullhead.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not ranked

Footnote

1 Nomination

• Foreign Language Picture: Israel (Ajami, Waltz with Bashir, Beaufort, Beyond the Walls, Operation Thunderbolt, The House on Chelouche Street, I Love You Rosa, The Policeman, Sallah)

Director: Joseph Cedar

Cast: Lior Ashkenazi, Shlomo Bar-Aba, Yuval Scharf, Alma Zack, Aliza Rosen.

This is Israel's fourth nomination in the last five years! Either the Israeli artistic group who chooses these films is really excellent or the Israeli film industry is really good at making films that appeal to the old USAmericans who vote for these things. Or both. Joseph Cedar has already been nominated in this category, as well, for 2008's Beaufort about the defense of a Fortress on the Lebanese border. The other two recent nominees, Ajami and Waltz with Bashir have also been very good. I am not expecting Footnote to take home the Oscar on Sunday, but I am, of course, happy that the Academy has maintained a sustained interest in the Middle East and its politics.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not ranked

Monsieur Lazhar

1 Nomination

• Foreign Language Picture: Canada (Incendies, Water, The Barbarian Invasions, Jesus in Montreal, The Decline of the American Empire)

Director: Philippe Falardeau

Cast: Mohammed Fellag, Sophie Nélisse, Émilien Néron, Danielle Proulx, Brigitte Poupart.

This is Canada's second nomination in two years. And one of the great things about Canadian cinema, it seems to me, is that – since the Academy changed its rules on exactly which language constitutes a "foreign" language – Canada has been submitting films about its immigrant populations and by its immigrant filmmakers. (Prior to this shift, all of the nominated films in this category had been directed by the great Denys Arcand.) Last year's Incendies (of which I was not particularly fond) is about Lebanese immigrants, and Indian-born Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta's wonderful Water doesn't even take place in Canada. Monsieur Lazhar is about an Algerian immigrant. I love this shift, and I look forward to this film. I should also note that both Monsieur Lazhar and Incendies were based on plays (by Évelyne de la Chenelière and Wajdi Mouwad, respectively).

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not ranked