Great enthusiasm around the choice of The Stranger as Italy’s Oscar entry for Best International Feature. Personally, and independently of my own assessment of the film, I’m not entirely convinced that elements such as genre (in the sense of cinematic genre) and the director’s young age will help push the film into the five-film shortlist: while it’s true that the Oscar for Best Genre is slowly opening up, it’s also true that the International Feature category is the one in the USA most associated with art-house, or auteur cinema. And then The Stranger, which we will see in theaters in about a week (so to be eligible as Italy’s candidate an ad hoc workaround had to be found, so to speak), has as its theme, broadly speaking, the family, which in these times is perhaps viewed as a somewhat cliché subject.
Al netto di queste considerazioni, il fatto è che il film di Strippoli se la dovrà vedere con rivali di notevole caratura: tra i film già annunciati come rappresentanti di Francia (Minotaur), Ungheria (Silent Friend), Romania (Fjord), Polonia (Fatherland), Giappone (All of a Sudden) e Corea (Possible Love), si sono ora aggiunti i candidati spagnolo e austriaco, che sono rispettivamente La bola negra e Rose.
The first one we saw at Cannes, where it was presented in competition and earned its two directors, Javier Ambrossi e Javier Calvo, the Best Director Award: it is a film that, with a deliberately baroque and maximalist style, from certain points of view very pop, and with militant queer fervor, tells a story across three different temporal layers that concerns Francoism, Federico Garcia Lorca, homosexuality in Spain, and the moral imperative of coming out. In Italy it will arrive in cinemas on January 14, and this is its brand-new official trailer:
Rose is instead been shown at Berlin, always in competition, and in this case also capable of taking home a prize: the Best Acting award (at Berlinale they no longer distinguish between male and female, as with public restrooms) awarded to Sandra Hüller, the German actress who we will soon also see beside Tom Cruise in the forthcoming Digger, which as a cinematic style stands in stark contrast. The film, directed by Markus Schleinzer, is in fact a very serious and strict work, perhaps too much so, shot in black and white and in 4:3, set in some remote German village in the seventeenth century and features Hüller as a young woman who lives her life — including married life — pretending to be a man (because, the implied subtext is, life for men has always been easier than that for women). It will obviously end very badly. Rose is distributed in numerous countries by MUBI, which will bring it to the cinema as well, and this is its first official trailer.
Comments