Best International Film: India, Thailand, Cambodia
Sunday, December 8, 2024 at 3:00PM ;)
At The Film Experience, we've always loved following and celebrating the Best International Film Oscar race. This season's no different, so you can expect many reviews in the next week as one counts down to the Academy's much-anticipated shortlists, when the competition will be severely cut down from its original 85 contenders. Voting for the shortlists opens on December 9th and closes on the 13th, with results announced on the 17th. Until then, let's dive deep into the wonders of world cinema, starting with a trip to the South of Asia.
Our journey commences with India's Lost Ladies, selected amid controversy because of All We Imagine As Light's politicized snubbing. Then, Thailand's How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, which has become an unlikely blockbuster and worldwide crowd pleaser. And finally, Cambodia's Meeting with Pol Pot, where iconoclast filmmaker Rithy Panh tries his hand at some period drama conventions…
LOST LADIES, Kiran Rao (India)
Also known as Laapataa Ladies, this Kiran Rao film tells the story of two young brides who get accidentally swapped on the cross-country train ride to their new life as married women. Set in a pre-social media 2001, the entire plot hinges on the anonymity of a ghoonghat in bright scarlet and gold, patterned and fringed, obscuring the identities of all those who don it to forge a nuptial bond. Whether they are happy brides or those who feel shackled into matrimony, the veil erases it all and equalizes the women, resulting in the sort of hijinks that lead to Phool and Jaya switching grooms and all the chaos that ensues. For the former, that means abandonment at the station, unmoored and alone, dependent on the kindness of strangers, beggars, and street vendors who teach her how to be independent.
For the latter, the situation is less Dickensian, though much more convoluted. Unlike the poor Phool, who married for love, Jaya was forced into an unwanted arranged marriage with a cruel man. Her dreams of higher education once forfeited but now renewed, the conundrum of traded places serves as an opportunity to escape. But this is a crowd-pleasing comedy of errors, so Jaya's story can't be as simple or self-serving as it may initially appear. Moved by the plight of Phool's groom and his family's kindness, hounded by a suspicious police inspector, she invents a new identity and stays put in hopes of finding Phool before it's too late, and she's lost forevermore. It all ends well as befit such a piece of popular entertainment, with such unrelenting trust in the goodwill of authority figures that the narrative can't help but feel a tad fantastical.
The ending's Deus ex Machina aside, Lost Ladies is a sugared treat of a movie full of broad, but not ineffective performances. As Phool and Jaya, respectively, Nitanshi Goel and Pratubha Ranta are skilled at balancing the unvarnished emotional toll of the brides with the picture's need for farcical fun. Sparsh Shruvastava is similarly solid as Phool's unlucky husband and Ravi Kishan steals the spotlight with his comedic turn as the inspector who doesn't ever buy Jaya's attempts at misdirection. Kiran Rao has a fine hand with actors, though his audiovisual storytelling could do with more sophistication. For example, the glossiness of Vikash Nowlakha's cinematography detracts from the materiality which shines in the film's early passages, when so much of the marital rite and garb capture the camera's attention.
Yet, it'd be erroneous to call Lost Ladies an ugly movie. Some moments reach for an everyday splendor, transcendent beauty that catches your eye in a fleeting instant, like when streetlights illuminate a bride's face through her veil, or the night air makes the fabric flutter like butterfly wings. As it often happens in mainstream Indian cinema, the greatest spectacle resides in the soundtrack, where musical narration works as a displaced Greek chorus. There, the romance part of this pseudo romcom can reach its full potential, giving a voice to Phool's silent melancholy, her beloved's devotion, and Jaya's desire for freedom. If only the score proper had a lighter touch, less forthright with its tonal intentions. Oh well, Lost Ladies is a charming little lark, even when you can feel composer Ram Sampath beating you into submission.
HOW TO MAKE MILLIONS BEFORE GRANDMA DIES, Pat Boonitipat (Thailand)
On Tomb Sweeping Day, a Thai family comes together at the cemetery, three generations communing for a moment before they all go back to their separate lives. Mengiu, the matriarch, speaks of this, yearning for a bigger unity between her brood. Most of it falls on deaf years, and the rest comes out in the form of complaining. So is Mengiu's way. Only, on this particular day, something else brings her adult children and grandchildren together, for the matriarch faints unexpectedly. We come to know she's got terminal cancer and not long to live, something that the woman's descendants plan to hide from her. That includes M, her daughter's layabout son who's got not ambition, no prospects, no future. What he does have is an idea.
Inspired by a younger cousin who just inherited a fortune from the grandfather she nursed until his death, M decides to become Mengiu's caretaker in this trying time. And so, the table is set for a sinister spin on something like The Farewell, touching on both the rites of Thai mourning and this family's intergenerational selfishness. However, the lie doesn't last long and the relationship between M and Mengiu doesn't follow an expected route. Sure, the general arc of faked affection becoming feeling genuine is there. But Pat Boonitipat and co-writer Thodsapon Thiptinnakorn add some wrinkles to the sentimental plot, including a couple of unexpected choices, bursts of cruelty, a touch of sharpness that helps counteract the potential cloyingness of the narrative recipe. There's nothing wrong with an old-fashioned weepie but variation is always welcome.
Much of it comes down to the film's two leads, Putthipong Assaratanakul as M and Usha Seamkhum as Mengiu. The latter is especially keen and flinty, often performing the grandmother's behavior as a well-oiled shtick she uses to test and play with her family. Within a clan and culture that leads many to consider their loved ones as financial assets, some of that disaffection manifests within the one who has become the object in her grandson's moneymaking scheme. Mengiu's trust only goes so far and the delineation of those limits is a fundamental part of Seamkhum's work. Truly, there is appreciable sobriety to the dramatization of an old woman's clash with mortality, isolation, and the growing inability to be self-sufficient after a long life lived independently. Assaratanakul is commendable, most impressive at the end, while Sarunrat Thomas deserves praise for the layers she adds to the thankless role of M's mother.
These qualities help elevate How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies above similar projects, but they don't entirely make up for some missteps along the way. The shooting style is often perfunctory to a fault, following the crisp deep focus of digital to its plastic extreme and detracting from the lived-in realism of the domestic spaces. Some moments find startling beauty within this register, however. I think of a nocturnal prayer, observed through a mosquito net, light split by the material, painting a rainbow over the older woman's curved back. The editing manages the constant need for montage with aplomb, and the music is overemphasized but never unpleasant to the ear. If nothing else, it lulls the audience into false comfort while the text puts forward and questions a state of affairs where familial bonds are broached and approached with transactional intent.
MEETING WITH POL POT, Rithy Panh (Cambodia)
In 1978, Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell and American journalists Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman traveled to Cambodia, then known as Democratic Kampuchea, to observe how the Khmer Rouge had transformed the country. They were among the few foreigners ever invited by the regime, perchance in an attempt to create new international narratives in the face of backlash against Pol Pot's dictatorship. This trip even included an interview opportunity with the leader, and was later immortalized by Becker in her book When the War Was Over. That piece of non-fiction writing is the base upon which Rithy Panh built his first narrative feature in years, having become a world-renowned documentarist thanks to films like The Missing Picture and Graves Without a Name.
The Khmer Rouge's genocidal actions have long been at the center of the director's efforts, though he tends to explore historical memory through direct testimony or even his own memories. He certainly has avoided telling the story of those in power, preferring to catalog the effects that such figures and their actions had on the general Cambodian population. In Meeting with Pol Pot, this balance is so inverted that the camera arrives in the country aligned with a foreign perspective. Specifically, French, as the anglophone trio of reporters have been heavily fictionalized into an idiosyncratic yet nationally homogenous group. There's Irène Jacob's Lise, morally righteous and steady in her pursuit of the truth beneath propaganda. Grégoire Colin is Alain, a leftwing Western academic whose ideological ties to the regime leave him blind to the atrocities committed.
And finally, Paul, a Black photographer played by Cyril Gueï in what is simultaneously the film's most vibrantly realized character and its most nebulous characterization. Simply put, neither Panh nor screenwriter Pierre Erwan Guillaume seem especially sure how to depict the racial dynamics and specific political readings they inserted into this historical episode. They also don't seem sure about Lise's naivete or just how much Alain understands about the regime. What degree of shock should he embody once the notion that it's preferable to have no people instead of imperfect ones comes out of Pol Pot's mouth? Overall, every fictionalizing gesture tends to detract from the ruthless dismantlement of state-created narratives, so gossamer they seem ready to tear themselves apart at the faintest push. Moreover, it's dramatically inert.
The picture's thesis is strongest when examining the parameters of the Khmer Rouge's simulation-like vision for the nation. This is especially true when such inquiries privilege formal tensions over narrative ones, even if Panh's multimedia strategy can sometimes err on the side of slippery ambiguities. He presents so many levels of artifice – clay dioramas, real footage reinterpreted and re-edited, symbolic scenography, palimpsestic projections – that one starts to lose sight of the mediated reality. The prism of refraction obscures what we should be perceiving to the point we can't decipher its general shape or the intent of the presentation. Whatever the case, it's impossible to deny the formal brio at hand, dazzling even in the pits of confusion, always thought-provoking. I was especially taken with Aymerick Pilarski's lensing, its penchant for geometry and theatrical obfuscation.
Oscar Odds? How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies feels like a sure bet for the shortlist. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if it were nominated since AMPAS is anything but averse to sentimental crowd-pleasers. Being on Netflix will also help, just as with Lost Ladies. Sadly, Meeting with Pol Pot seems fated to be forgotten, especially since there's been so little critical fanfare around it.
Reader Comments (1)
It's interesting that you think HOW TO MAKE MILLIONS is a shoo-in for the shortlist. I really enjoyed it and found it sweet and moving but not saccharine and after it was over I was like "well, that's never making it". haha. Maybe I'm still resenting the Academy for their persistent resistante to Asian cinema (outside of Japan) though admittedly the past 5-7 years seem to be changing that.
that said, this category has become increasingly hard to predict in terms of finalist lists so maybe you're right) and the actual nominees extracted from those lists, too.