This year's Oscar for "Best International Feature Film", [Parasite] won without suspense.
It is also because its light is too dazzling, it is easy to overlook the other 4 films that have also been nominated.
These are some of the best non-English-language films in the world over the past year.
[Pain and Glory] [Les Misérables] [Land of Honey] [Eucharist]
So here's the problem. If there were no [parasites], who do you think would win the prize?
My answer will come from this Polish film, [The Eucharist].
[Corpus Christi] Douban 7.7 IMDb 7.7 Rotten Tomatoes Freshness 98%
First of all, I was amazed by the poster of [The Eucharist].
Unlike the old-fashioned, well-mannered priest in the impression, the priest on the poster is a passionate spiritual boy.
The expressions and movements were extremely frantic, rebellious and overflowing, blending in with the believers behind them who were clapping hard. Definitely a strong contender for "Poster of the Year".
Father's Agent
In keeping with the temperament exuded by the poster, [The Eucharist] is also a film that does not play by common sense.
The film opens with a violent incident in a juvenile detention center.
Daniel, 20, who was holding the wind at the door of the carpentry workshop, did not participate in the fight, but the hollow look in his eyes suggested that he had long been accustomed to this violence.
Daniel is in jail for manslaughter, but he's not one of those vicious juvenile dementias.
Instead, he has a strong desire for self-redemption, seeking an opportunity for change.
Daniel was also a devout Catholic, and Father Thomas of the Juvenile Institute taught him many things. However, due to his criminal record, he was unable to enter seminary.
Released on parole, he was temporarily assigned to a sawmill in a rural town. As he was leaving, he took Father Thomas's collar.
Daniel was repeatedly told to be sober during parole and not to cause trouble. However, the first three things he did after he went out were to take drugs, drink alcohol, and have sex.
Daniel came to the allotted sawmill, looked around, and left. He did not report as scheduled, and went to the church in the town to sit down.
He took out the stolen Roman collar and falsely claimed that he was a priest newly sent from the Chinese diocese, but he did not expect to be fooled by him.
The local priest was in poor health and had a bad problem with alcoholism. So he designated the new Daniel as his successor and replaced him for a while.
Daniel had no reason to refuse, and as a result, a fake priest temporarily became a priest's agent.
How to become a priest? According to the normal secular process, first of all, god is devotion, then the training of the seminary is completed, and finally the diocese bishop is appointed.
But [The Corpus Christi] understanding of the priest skips all the lines and authorizes it directly from an existential point of view: if a teenager puts on the priest's robe, then he can be a priest, even if he is a sinner.
Daniel, as a priest, went to listen to the confessions of believers, so he had to temporarily hold his feet, open his mobile phone to search for confessional ceremonies, and now learn and sell, just like you who cheated on exams; on the day of hosting Mass, you stayed up all night to review The Bible chapters, just like you reviewed before the exam.
There are often bonuses for newbies on the road, as does Daniel. He copied what he had learned in the juvenile detention center, followed suit, and completely intimidated the local believers in an alternative style of preaching.
As a socially excluded person, he had a sense of belonging for the first time when he, as a priest, greeted the applause and cheers of his followers with open arms.
The sermon is cool for a while, and the sermon has always been cool.
Daniel gained popularity in the town, gathered people's hearts, and even took the initiative to increase the difficulty of the game: a tragedy occurred in the town not long ago - seven young people were killed in a car accident, and the families of the deceased could not get out of their grief.
Inspired by idealism and mission, Daniel decided to help the town emerge from its former shadow and make the town a whole again.
However, the movie has been hinting that Daniel's lies are coming to an end...
The cleverness of the story is that as Daniel deviates from his self-knowledge, in the midst of subtle satire, the chaos of a polish rural town unfolds slowly.
The pace of the film is very slow, it is a kind of simple static, guiding Daniel step by step to the depths of the town. The deeper it goes, the more dangerous it becomes, alluding to Daniel's sermon that "silence can also be a prayer." ”
The film brushes on his process of becoming a priest, and the lies are easily successful, because the focus is on the exploration of the protagonist's spiritual world.
The Polish actor Bartos Bilenia, who plays Daniel, is credited with having charming blue eyes and the ability to stand still at any time, giving the character a nervous impulse and a wise, compassionate humanity.
Bartos Bileña as Daniel
Everyone was chasing him. Gang members, town cops, fellow juvenile detention centers, and his dark past are also chasing him. He has nowhere to run, so he uses the priest's disguise to steal a little time so that he can live like a person and find ways to do some "good things."
Such mystery and complexity is the most attractive place.
When casting daniel, the crew assigned two tasks to each auditioner. First, preaching in his own words, freestyle; second, expressing anger at the camera, as if facing a group of thugs.
Many actors can play these two settings well, and some can only play one of them, except for Bartos Bilenia.
He couldn't play both well, not a priest or a mob. He is himself.
And then the director said, it's you. "You don't know his story. At the beginning of the film, his story begins. He shaped himself from what he saw, and he stole identity. So, he's been shaping himself. ”
Director Jan Comasa said: "I wanted to use my lens to capture the moment when a person needs faith. Be an atheist, an agnostic, or a believer. ”
The strongest manifestation of this moment in the film is undoubtedly the last shot: Daniel escapes from the juvenile detention center for the second time, he is panicked and dazed, this time he has no direction and no goal, and he does not even look like a person.
Cinematographer Pioter Sobosinski ends the film with an extremely disturbing shot.
A divided world
[The Eucharist] is the third feature film by Polish director Jan Komasa, whose story is inspired by real events in news reports.
Looking at the film beyond the character of Daniel itself, it is a metaphor for a larger topic that rises to the heights of the entire country.
Poland is the most devout Catholic country in Central Europe, and Poles always say, "Our history is the history of catholic suffering." ”
95% of Poles are Catholic, and more than 40% regularly attend weekend Mass
Pretending to be a priest happens several times a year in Poland's major communities or towns, and there are always people who have a deformed fascination with the status of spiritual leaders.
[The Corpus Christi] is based on the story of Patrick, who pretended to be a priest in a community in Poland for half a year until it was finally revealed.
Interestingly, the final verdict was that Patrick was found not guilty of any law against "pretending to be a priest," but the punishment he faced was: expulsion from the church, no more sacraments, and no weddings in the church.
For a true Catholic, this would be a more cruel punishment than imprisonment; if not, it would be a risk of escape.
The paradoxes and contradictions in this story are exactly what [Christ the Saints] see: When false prayer meets a fake priest, does everything still make sense?
As for the tragedy of the car accident in the town, it was added later by the writers and directors, referring to the "Polish Presidential Plane Crash" that occurred on April 10, 2010.
As a result, 96 people were killed, including a number of senior Polish officials, including the Polish president
The accident led to an endless stream of conspiracy theories in Poland, and the whole country was almost divided into two camps, causing secondary damage to democracy and society itself.
The director felt the impact of this accident on the Polish political situation and people's hearts, and in [The Corpus Christi], he used the damage caused by the car accident to the town and called on people to reunite in the midst of division.
In the words of the director, "We live in a divided world, but remain silent with each other, replacing communication with each other." ”
"Moral Anxiety Movie"
[Christ the Saints] retains the distinctive characteristics of Polish cinema, rich in thought, exquisite artistry and compassionate humanistic feelings.
If it were to be categorized, it would still be a typical Polish "moral anxiety film", or a "new moral anxiety film".
The "Moral Anxiety Film" is a genre of films that broke off in Poland in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and its main feature is to tear up the flashy appearance of the achievements of social construction advocated by the authorities and present a real Poland on the screen.
The main directors involved are Anjay Vajda, Krzystov Zanusi, and the young Kieslowski and Agnieska Holland.
Polish director Andrei Vajda
In the later stages of the "Moral Anxiety Film" movement, some directors believed that the description of the current reality was sufficient and began to seek an exploration of individual survival.
This batch of films, which are based on the current social reality and refract a number of social problems with the individual facing major moral choices as the starting point, is also known as the "new moral anxiety film", including [Reverse Teress] [Eddie] [Debt Collector] [Nun Ida] and so on.
Robert Grinsky [Reverse Terress]
The theme of the masterpiece "Moral Anxiety Film" [The Call of the Mountain], is to ask whether it is possible for a person to live a life in which behavior is consistent with morality. Especially in a society where behavior is generally decoupled from conscience, is it possible to "live authentically"?
Krzyshtov Zanusi [The Call of the Mountain]
This is exactly what [the Eucharist] asks, except that the man who desires to "live authentically" is not a so-called "good man" who is identified as a "good man", he just wants to be a "good man".
In this hard-won world of forgiveness, should someone who has made a mistake give him a second chance?
Resources:
Zeng Hong. Between Politics and Art: An Analysis of the Polish "Moral Anxiety Film"[J], Contemporary Cinema, 2015
[2] Adam Crook. Polish Cinema: The Lost Decade[J].World Cinema, 2013, (5), 28-35
[3] Alex Heeney,Director Jan Komasa on Corpus Christi and the priest impersonation problem,Seventh-row(7R)
[4] Christopher Vourlias,Polish Director Jan Komasa on Venice Days, Toronto Player Corpus Christi, Variety
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