Hungary's entry into the foreign-language Oscar race, On Body and Soul, is an unusual romance between two lonely characters who meet at work. He's the finance director, an older man with a withered arm. She is the young quality-control inspector – and autistic. By coincidence, they discover they share the same dream every night – they are a stag and doe searching for food in the woods – and then struggle to turn this puzzling psychic bond into an actual one.
Besides that fantastical element, this riveting film by Ildiko Enyedi stands out because it is set in a slaughter house. And don't think that if you watch the film on Netflix, where it's now available, you are going to avoid a frank look at the manufacturing processes these unlikely lovers oversee.
Filmed with a cool visual style and unhurried pace, this slaughterhouse romance makes best-picture nominee The Shape of Water look formulaic and downright sentimental. On Body and Soul is decidedly un-Hollywood, but is the film uniquely European, Eastern European or even Hungarian? Perhaps not.
Enyedi has told interviewers that the idea of the mutual dream was influenced by Carl Jung's theory of a collective unconsciousness shared by humans around the planet. And she points out that the cinema is also a place where an audience shares images as though experiencing the same dream. This year is a particularly strong one for the foreign-language category of the annual Academy Awards, taking place Sunday, with five distinctive and provocative films representing the best of the world. Sure, they feature exotic settings and local political concerns – but, mainly, they reflect an increasingly global cinema as likely to appeal to audiences in Saskatoon as Santiago or Boston as Beirut.
"There is a uniqueness to every filmmaker and voice [but] in the art-house context, people have been exposed to films from around the world and there is a commonality of storytelling that comes about," observes Hussain Amarshi of Mongrel Media, the Canadian distributor for two of the five nominees, A Fantastic Woman and Loveless. "It is a universal language and what gets out into the world tends to be the more universal work. … Most people are exposed to art from all over the world now and it does then question the notion of a national cinema. In the current context, it's hard to identify unique national voices. … People are creating stuff that is more mongrelized."
Daniela Vega as Marina in A Fantastic Woman.
Sony Pictures Classics
A Fantastic Woman is probably the best example from the five of this globalized cinema. The story of a transgender woman ostracized by the family of her dead lover, it leaves behind Chile's painful political history to consider contemporary Western social concerns in a film that presents Santiago as a place like any other cosmopolitan city in the developed world.
In a significant departure from recent studio movies addressing similar issues, director Sebastian Lelio cast a trans actor, Daniela Vega, to play Marina, a night-club singer and waitress whose older lover dies suddenly one night, leaving her to cope with his hostile family. Perhaps you might want to interpret a fantastical dance number, in which Marina emerges as a vision in feathers and sequins, as particularly Latin in sensibility, but mainly, the film is widely accessible and highly topical.
Sometimes, this global cinematic language is very consciously deployed. To create The Insult, in which a dispute over a drain pipe between a Lebanese Christian and a Palestinian escalates into a criminal case, director Ziad Doueiri watched Hollywood's courtroom classics from Judgment at Nuremberg to Kramer vs. Kramer. Then he wrote his script in English before translating it back.
"I am more familiar with the dialogue in American movies; I am familiar with the psyche; it was certainly influenced by American courtroom drama," says Doueiri, who spent 18 years working in Hollywood but now lives in Paris, where he's directing the French political TV drama Baron Noir.
Meanwhile, The Insult's message about achieving compromise between warring sects has a direct application for many audiences, including the mainly American members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Elisabeth Moss in The Square.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Magnolia Pictures
On the other hand, the nomination list does include films that feel intensely nationally specific.
Andrey Zvyagintsev's Loveless is a harrowing drama set in contemporary Russia that features a viciously divorcing couple whose 12-year-old son goes missing. The condemnation of parents too busy chasing sex, money and the next text message to nurture a child could apply in many a Western country, but the extremities of the situation and bitterness of the critique seem local, while the mournful pace of the film recalls the classics of Soviet cinema from filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky.
Any viewer can grasp Zvyagintsev's message, but the film is about Russia.
Similarly, to a North American sensibility, there is something uniquely Scandinavian about Ruben Ostlund's daring and sophisticated The Square, featuring the misadventures of the chief curator of a modern-art museum in Sweden. The Square is a critique of the paradoxical way in which wealthy cultural elites gather around transgressive avant-garde art: What other place would dare produce a film on a theme as rarefied as the political dynamics of the contemporary art world?
The Square's unhurried length and surreal flourishes – a gorilla appears without explanation in the apartment of a journalist – also seem particularly European, and a comic scene in which the journalist insists on disposing of her lover's used condom does have a good-humoured attitude toward sex that could be identified as stereotypically Swedish.
Still, North American audiences will recognize a familiar face here – Elisabeth Moss plays the journalist in question – while Ostlund's concern with the gap between the dispossessed and the elites makes The Square a film of the moment that asks any Western audience to examine its own privilege.
Matvey Novikov as Alyosha in Loveless.
Sony Pictures Classics
Notoriously sentimental and conservative, Academy members may not wish to do so. It seems more probable they'll vote for the easily likable
A Fantastic Woman, giving it bonus points for actually using a trans actor as it advances a social concern that Hollywood itself has just started to address.
The Insult is also a strong contender for the prize, partly because of Doueiri's history: He was briefly arrested in Lebanon last year for filming parts of his previous movie, The Attack, in Israel – because it was set there – and is proving himself a filmmaker willing to cross traditional divides. He comes from a secular Muslim family and The Insult is highly sympathetic to its Palestinian character, but it also unearths the traumatic civil-war history of Lebanon's Christian communities. (Ironically, Lebanese Muslims have been boycotting the film just because of the fuss over The Attack.) The result is a universal message about rising above tribalism that should speak to audiences everywhere, and a film that has done well outside Lebanon.
"People are not getting bogged down in the Middle Eastern politics; they see the characters; they see how we live in a polarized world," the director says. "The Western audience has been very engaged in the film."
Whichever one wins, all of these titles are now reaching wider global audiences merely because of the Oscar nod. "The films you see in this category are more profound, more urgent stories," Amarshi says. "For most of these films, the nomination is the win."
A deer by water, a gorilla on a couch, a singer in a nightclub, searchers spreading through bleak woods in winter and a crowd erupting in a courtroom – an international cinema produces its own dream bank of startling imagery that can be drawn on by audiences around the world.