Dirty Pretty Things (2003)

 

Dirty Pretty Things can be a difficult film to categorize. It’s sometimes called a thriller or a crime drama or even a romance of sorts, which it is at times, albeit a very unconventional one, certainly. It’s also a searing examination of the immigrant experience in London, that city where so many of the formerly colonized have gone to try to make a new life. I’ve always considered it primarily a character study focusing on Okwe (played perfectly by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a cab driver and night desk clerk at the Baltic Hotel who was a doctor in his home country of Nigeria. That’s quite the character description, isn’t it? Okwe always seems to be the moral center of the plot, never wanting, as he puts it, to harm anyone and always trying to do the moral or right thing. However, after he discovers a heart clogging a toilet in one of the hotel rooms, he (and we) has to confront a rather bizarre series of plot twists. The woman he loves, a Turkish immigrant named Senay (Audrey Tautou), faces the constant threat of raids by immigration officers because she’s not supposed to be working (at the hotel or at a sweatshop) or taking rent from someone else like Okwe. Their scenes together are lovely but challenging because we know what they seem unable to say: they love each other. We also learn that the hotel manager, a guy called Sneaky (Sergi Lopez), has been selling organs like kidneys on the black market in exchange for forged passports and citizenship papers, and he’s been using vacant hotel rooms as the locations for the surgeries. Befitting such dark subject matter, the film features some very evocative gritty cinematography so that we’re always aware of the kind of lives these people have to endure. Most of the characters are from somewhere other than London or England, and the international cast brings the plight of the undocumented to the surface throughout the film. Dirty Pretty Things has some exceptional actors in addition to Ejiofor and Tautou, including Sophie Okonedo as Juliette, a hooker with a good heart (and who gains a great deal of depth with the Okonedo’s performance), and Benedict Wong as Guo Yi, Okwe’s friend who works in a crematorium and helps him to obtain medical supplies from the hospital. Decades after its initial release, Dirty Pretty Things still has the ability to shock at times and to move a viewer to tears, and few films can take as many risks as it does with such great results.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Screenplay

The 400 Blows (1959)

 

Director Francois Truffaut reportedly based The 400 Blows on his own childhood. The lead character of Antoine Doinel (played for the first time here by Jean-Pierre Leaud) is really a rather ordinary young boy who keeps getting into trouble with the school authorities and with his parents for what seem to be rather harmless actions. For example, he loses his recess time early in the film due to a “naughty” picture he’s caught with; it wasn’t his picture, and most of the other boys in the classroom had already seen it by the time it got to Antoine. Why wasn’t everyone punished? Because Antoine was the one who had the incriminating photo when the teacher turned around. To be honest, none of Antoine’s alleged crimes seem all that significant to us nowadays, at least not from my perspective. He writes some bad things on the wall after being punished by his teacher? He forgets to bring home flour from the store? He plays hooky from school with a friend and goes to the movies and to an arcade and to a centrifuge? None of these seem particularly serious, frankly, and he’s seemingly no worse than any of the other boys in his school. He just seems to get punished more. By the way, his punishment for one of his alleged crimes is conjugating? That’s a pretty severe way of getting someone to do that onerous task. We learn a bit more about his family dynamic as the movie progresses. His mother (Claire Maurier) is cheating on her husband with another man, and we realize that the man Antoine calls his father (Albert Remy) is actually his stepfather. Perhaps there’s always been tension between the three of them over their connections or disconnections. Antoine runs away from home after his stepfather slaps him in front of his classmates and stays with his friend who’s also been suspended. By the way, the reason Antoine was suspended was due to his being so inspired by a Balzac novel that he wrote a closing for his essay that was meant as a homage to the great French writer but was considered plagiarism instead. I always knew Balzac was trouble; it’s why I’ve tried to avoid reading his works. Of course, some of what Antoine does could be chalked up to youthful ignorance. He and his friend steal a typewriter from his father’s office (even though they’re apparently all marked) and try to sell it for some cash. They fail at this, so they try to return it only to see Antoine caught and then jailed for vagrancy and theft. He winds up in an observation center for juveniles, and we get to witness two remarkable sequences as a result. One is an interrogation or interview that was reportedly improvised, and you get to see Leaud at his most charming and vulnerable. The other is the final scene where an astonishing tracking shot follows him as he runs away from the detention center and winds up at the sea, a place he’s always wanted to visit. The film ends with a closeup of Antoine’s face as he stares at the camera. It’s one of the most famous endings in film history for a reason. What is going through his mind? What will happen to him next? As one of the earliest films in the French New Wave movement, The 400 Blows sets a high standard for excellence. By the way, I would like to note that the film itself pays tribute to the joy we receive from the movies. Antoine and his friend go to see a movie when they play hooky, and the whole family enjoys a night out at the cinema, talking about the film they saw on the way home. A charming film that reveals our love of the movies is quite an accomplishment.

Oscar Nomination: Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

A Quiet Place (2018)

 

A Quiet Place is a masterful film in so many ways. It truly deserved more Oscar attention than it received (a sole nomination for its amazing sound design), but popular opinion ensures that the film will be remembered long after the memories of award-show glory have gone. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where sound-sensitive monsters from another planet have attacked Earth and killed almost everyone, the film chooses not to focus upon that story directly, but instead it shows us how a family isolated on a farm has adjusted to this new and frightening reality. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski (who also directed), married in real life, play a couple whose primary goal seems to be the protection of their three young children. Everyone has to keep silent as much as possible, communicating when necessary via American Sign Language or waiting until their speech might be drowned out by a louder, more natural sound like a waterfall. The family has learned to be pretty much self-sufficient, but the dangers of their world appear early in the film. It’s a bold move on the part of the filmmakers to kill off the youngest (at the time) child near the start of the narrative, but it does quickly cement for us as viewers the very real dangers everyone must now deal with. Every little incident becomes a potential threat, so footsteps have to be carefully mapped and even the corn shifting in a silo could possibly lead to someone’s death. The monsters themselves are, oddly enough, incredibly loud, and the method for getting rid of them turns out to be a genius move. Blunt gives the best performance in the film, but everyone here is astonishingly good. Without the words that actors can use in most performances to convey emotion, everyone has to use their facial expressions more. The casting of Millicent Simmonds, an actress with hearing loss, as daughter Regan was an inspired choice, and her talent really influenced the performances of the others. A Quiet Place is not a silent film – it even has a musical score at times – but it does know how to use silence so effectively.

Oscar Nomination: Best Achievement in Sound Editing