Movies from Afar

I originally wrote a long intro about how foreign films are better than American films and why and blah blah blah. But it comes down to this: Get over the subtitle thing and enjoy some great flicks.

Note: These are strictly my favorites and in the order I like them; I realize some great ones are missing. Also, I haven't chosen more than one by any single director. Otherwise, I'd have been here all day. (I know I can sound definitive with some of my comments, as if these weren't simply my opinions, but trust me, they are only that. I just get carried away.)

15.  Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954, Japan): The greatest Eastern action movie is also the greatest Western ever filmed. It's funny and thrilling at the same time, and the characters take on a grandeur that's almost Shakespearean. Toshiro Mifune is a force of nature.

14.  M (Lang, 1931, Germany): Peter Lorre is a child murderer, and not only are the police after him, but underworld gangs who want the cops off their backs. For me, this is easily Lorre's greatest performance. His humanity makes him both more pathetic and more frightening. Too bad he wasn't given material as rich here in the States. Favorite moment: a child's balloon caught in some telephone wires.

13.  Face to Face (Bergman, 1976, Sweden): Choosing just one Bergman film is tough, and so many of them are more highly regarded than this one. But this story about a psychiatrist's own struggle with mental illness just chewed me up and spit me out. Liv Ullmann is breathtaking, giving what I consider best performance. Her breakdown is so real, you want to stop the projector and comfort her. (This is the movie Woody Allen and Diane Keaton were going to see in Annie Hall until he found out it had already started.)

12.  Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966, France): A film about the life of a donkey in the French countryside. Bresson imbues Balthazar with a kind of humanity that's missing in some of his human characters, and that's by choice. Critics have compared the donkey to Christ, and I think I see what they're getting at. Favorite scene: the last one, as moving as can be.

11.  Diabolique (Clouzot, 1955, France): The movie that did for bathtubs what Psycho did for showers. I spent years hearing how unnerving this one was before I finally saw it, and I was afraid my expectations might have been too high. Fat chance. This is edge-of-the-seat stuff all the way, and the ending is as wild as anything Hitchcock ever did.

10.  Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969, France/Algeria): I think this was the first foreign film I saw as a teen. I had no idea a movie could be so thrilling (only North by Northwest excited me as much up to that point). It's the true story of an assassination and coverup in Greece, and it perfectly mirrored the political unrest that was going on in this country at the time. But it's not dated at all. Favorite scene: the assassination itself and subsequent fight in the back of a moving truck bed.

9.  Forbidden Games (Clement, 1952, France): A little girl (Brigitte Fossey) is orphaned during the Battle of France and befriended by a farm boy and his family. The two children cope with the trauma of war all around them by burying dead animals they find and marking the graves with little crosses. Only Grave of the Fireflies (Takahata, 1988, Japan), about a young brother and sister trying to survive amid the ravages of war, comes close as a powerful anti-war statement. (Fireflies, though animated, is devastating; don't see it if you're planning to party afterwards.) In the final scene, Fossey will rip your heart out. Favorite scene: apart from that ending, the moment the girl realizes her dog has died in the battle and what happens next.

8.  The Dreamlife of Angels (Zonka, 1998, France): Two disparate young working-class women become roommates in a drama that took me by surprise -- I didn't expect it to have nearly the impact it did when it ended. Eloide Bouchez and Natacha Regnier shared the best actress award at that year's Cannes Film Festival. Favorite scene: a gut-wrencher – Isa writing a goodbye note to Marie and what happens next.

7.  The Bicycle Thief (De Sica, 1948, Italy): I've sometimes thought of this as the greatest film ever made. The story is simple: a husband and father needs a bicycle in order to get a job to support his family. When his bicycle is stolen, he sets out with his young son to find it. Getting the bicycle back means the difference between sustenance and poverty. The Italian neo-realist look, and the levels of humanity and universality in every scene, make it beyond powerful. It's amazing to know that the father and son (the son looks a lot like a young Jay Leno) were both non-actors. Favorite scene: the close-up of the boy's face as his eyes follow his father passing by on another bicycle.

6.  Children of Paradise (Carne, 1945, France): No, wait, this is the greatest film ever made. It's a panoramic spectacle of street life and theater folk set in Paris during the early 1800s. What's impressive and almost hard to believe is that this three-hour movie was made clandestinely during the German occupation of France during WWII! Jean-Louis Barrault is heartbreaking as the lovestruck mime Baptiste. Favorite scene among many: Baptiste's first appearance, where he uses mime to reconstruct for the police a purse-snatching he witnessed.

5.  La Strada (Fellini, 1954, Italy): No, no, this is the absolute greatest film ever made (I think. . . .)! Like Bergman, Fellini is hard to narrow down to just one film, but this has always been my personal favorite. Giuletta Masina (Fellini's wife) is the homeless waif who takes to the road (“la strada”) with Anthony Quinn, a brutish strongman named Zampano. They give street performances in villages to earn money (most of the small crowds are made up of citizens actually seeing the act for the first time), Zampano breaking chains with his bare chest and Gelsomina banging a drum or tooting a trumpet. Zampano treats Gelsomina like dirt, but she won't leave him. She meets The Fool (Richard Basehart), who, stuck by her childlike countenance (he likens her face to an artichoke), takes a liking to her and explains why her life has meaning, and she takes this to heart. But The Fool is a trickster who needles Zampano every chance he gets, with tragic results. The music she plays on her trumpet and the ending are both famous. Favorite scene: gosh, where to begin? Maybe the sight of Gelsomina sitting on a curb at night, forlorn, as a white horse slowly passes by without a rider.

4.  A Separation (Farhadi, 2011, Iran): A middle-class Iranian couple living in Tehran decide to separate, but it's not that easy. I came to this expecting the plot to focus on the usual complications of impending divorce between a husband and wife and their young daughter. But the plot is more than that, and I was completely enthralled. Like De Sica, Farhadi does an amazing job of creating empathy for every character. I did have one problem, though – Leila Hatami, as the wife, is so strikingly attractive in such an intelligent and understated way that I had trouble focusing on the subtitles. It's the first Iranian film to win the Best Foreign Film Oscar.

3.  Cousin Cousine (Tacchella, 1975, France): This might be the only comedy about adultery that I've ever stayed in my seat for. It's not my favorite subject, nor one that I think can or should be played for laughs. But Tacchella has done the seemingly impossible – made a film so sweet and carefree with such funny and personable leads that it's irresistible. The affair itself is so understandable that it's hard not to root for the couple. You see, their spouses are having an affair with each other, and it's a dirty secret. The spurned pair, cousins by marriage, find consolation in the friendship that develops between them, and rumors soon begin to fly within the large extended family. Since they're attracted to each other anyway, they decide to give the rumormongers something to really talk about, only they don't keep it hidden in the shadows. Marie-Christine Barrault and Victor Lanoux are completely captivating as the friends who become lovers. Favorite scene: the final image, hilarious and perfectly loopy, as befits the movie as a whole.

2.  The Story of Adele H. (Truffaut, 1975, France): Wow, the eighth French film on this list; you'd think I was a Francophile or something. This was a hard one for me because Jules and Jim is a Truffaut classic that I'm very fond of as well. But this is my pick. The gorgeous and obscenely talented Isabelle Adjani (just 20 at the time) plays Adele, daughter of the celebrated French writer Victor Hugo. When she is jilted by Lt. Pinson (Bruce Robinson), a British officer who moves on to Nova Scotia with his regiment, she follows him, unable to believe that he doesn't want her. (He doesn't.) We watch as her obsession (was it ever love?) slowly morphs into madness. “Haunting” isn't even the word for this film or for Adjani's performance. Favorite scene: When a genuinely concerned Pinson finally sees her on the street, she walks past him, oblivious to everything around her.

1.  La Promesse (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 1996, France-Belgium): The film that brought the Dardenne brothers, documentarians up until then, worldwide acclaim. It's the story of a teen (Jeremie Renier) whose father (Olivier Gourmet) and he make a living by exploiting the undocumented workers the father brings into the country and puts to work illegally. When tragedy befalls one of the workers, the boy is faced with a moral dilemma that ultimately pits him against his father and leads to a powerful epiphany of grace. The use of handheld cameras and lack of a musical score give the film a documentary feel that makes it seem all the more immediate and real. My friend Dave and I saw La Promesse in a little theater in the University District of Seattle when it first came out. When the lights came up, we were speechless, and we didn't say a word for two blocks.