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foreign film

  • Certified Copy

    Certified Copy

    2010  ·  NR  ·  Film

    A film that asks you to hold two contradictory things at once — and rewards you for not resolving them.

    Abbas Kiarostami’s first film made outside Iran is built on a premise that the film itself refuses to explain: an Englishman and a French woman spend an afternoon together in Tuscany, and somewhere in the middle of it the nature of their relationship quietly shifts. Whether what follows is real or performed — whether they are strangers playing at being married, or a long-married couple playing at being strangers — the film declines to say. Juliette Binoche won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for her performance, and it is the kind of acting that makes you forget you are watching acting. The Tuscan light does the rest.

    Watch it with someone who enjoys a film that doesn’t arrive at a conclusion — who finds ambiguity generative rather than frustrating. It is a film about authenticity, which means it is also a film about marriage, about love that has calcified into habit, about whether any of that matters. It rewards a second viewing more than almost any film of its decade, because everything looks different once you have sat with the question it is asking. Best on a weekend evening when conversation afterward is available.

    VERDICT  ·  A film that shifts beneath your feet as you watch it — and stays with you longer for it.

    POUR  ·  A Brunello di Montalcino, or any Tuscan red with enough structure to hold the evening.

    Planning an evening around this? Films That End Better Than They Begin →

    The kind of film that rewards a second viewing. Find it on Blu-ray.

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  • Before Sunset

    Before Sunset

    2004  ·  R  ·  Film

    Eighty minutes in real time, one afternoon in Paris — a film about the conversation you keep returning to.

    Richard Linklater’s sequel to Before Sunrise is set entirely in the hours before a plane departs, which gives the whole film an undertow that never announces itself but is always there. Nine years have passed since Jesse and Céline spent a night in Vienna. They meet again in a Paris bookshop and walk and talk until a taxi finally stops in front of her apartment building. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy wrote much of their own dialogue and it shows — in the best way. The film sounds like two real people catching up, which means it sounds like two real people carefully circling everything they actually want to say. It is the rarest kind of sequel: one that earns the original by deepening it.

    Watch it with someone you have history with, or alone if the history is internal. It does not require having seen Before Sunrise, though that film gives this one more weight. The ending — the last few minutes in her apartment, the final line — is one of the best in American cinema of the decade, and lands differently each time depending on where you are. Best seen in the evening, when the light outside is doing something similar to what Paris is doing on screen.

    VERDICT  ·  The sequel that earns everything the first film promised.

    POUR  ·  A glass of Burgundy, something with a little age. Or a café au lait if the evening is long.

    Planning an evening around this? The Foreign Film Night →

    Some films belong on the shelf. Find it on Blu-ray.

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