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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.
This week, we asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors: What is a foreign film you’d recommend to somebody who hasn’t seen one before? Their picks—which follow an Argentinian lawyer’s life-changing case, two lovers in a French seaside town, and more—show that the boundaries of language don’t impede the thrill of a good story.
Argentina, 1985 (streaming on Prime Video)
If you tend to sit out non-American films, consider making an exception for Argentina, 1985. The courtroom drama is based on the true story of the trials of military-junta leaders who seized control of Argentina for more than seven years. Under their rule, thousands of leftists (and suspected leftists) disappeared. Many of the pregnant women who were taken to secret detention centers were killed after giving birth so that military couples could adopt the infants. The film starts almost two years after the dictatorship ended in 1983: Julio César Strassera, a Buenos Aires lawyer—big mustache, big glasses, nice suit—is tasked with taking the juntas’ leaders to court so that his newly democratic nation can confront its past and heal its wounds. This is an honor, but a daunting one; Strassera doesn’t want to do it.
Thankfully, for history and for the film’s plot, he eventually acquiesces. But just because everyone knows that terror and torture were the military’s favorite instruments doesn’t mean that this would be easy to prove in court. Strassera assembled a scrappy young team that traveled to remote corners of the country in search of evidence and testimonies. This was, after all, the first major war-crime trial since Nuremberg. But the historical importance of the subject matter is not the only reason this film is worth watching. It should also be appreciated—like any movie, foreign or not—for its exceptional storytelling and the vividness of its characters.
— Gisela Salim-Peyer, associate editor
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The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (streaming on HBO Max)
“Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” said the South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho upon accepting one of his four Oscars for Parasite in 2020. That movie, the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture, would be a solid entry point for any budding cineast looking to move beyond English-language filmmaking, but if that seems too obvious, go a little further back in time. Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a French musical from 1964, follows two star-crossed young lovers in a French seaside town; the gorgeous swoon of its visuals is balanced out by the melancholy of its narrative. If you like that, you can broaden out to other French films from that era—such as François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows or Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour.
— David Sims, staff writer
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Burnt by the Sun (available to rent on Prime Video and YouTube)
I admit, I’m not a high-culture, foreign-film kind of guy. (The last movie I saw in a theater was the new Superman.) But as someone who spent a career studying the Soviet Union and Russia, I do have one recommendation that is both a moving film and an artifact of two moments in history.
In 1994, the Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov released Burnt by the Sun, a quiet, haunting study of love and betrayal during one summer day in 1936, when Joseph Stalin’s purges of political dissidents and enemies were closing in on a Russian family. The father is a Soviet general named Kotov, played by Mikhalkov himself, whose life collapses around him when a man from his wife’s past arrives. The beauty of a summer day is overshadowed by dread, soon followed by black despair.
Mikhalkov captured both the ’30s and the new freedom of Russia in the ’90s in a single movie, but he apparently learned nothing from his own work: He later became a Russian nationalist, a loyal ally of President Vladimir Putin, and a supporter of the invasion of Ukraine. To watch Burnt by the Sun, the viewer must separate the artist from the art, but it is sad to realize how much Mikhalkov, too, separated himself from his creation.
— Tom Nichols, staff writer
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Shadow (影) (streaming on Hulu, Tubi, and Prime Video)
Zhang Yimou’s early wuxia masterpiece, Hero (英雄), is a titan of the genre, but I’ll take any opportunity to rhapsodize about his 2018 film, Shadow (影). Set during China’s Three Kingdoms period, the martial-arts drama takes its time in establishing its players and stakes, but non–Mandarin speakers need not fear: The film is meant to be experienced as a tone poem, and its central preoccupations—the slipperiness of identity, the dialogue between yin and yang—come through in its visual grammar. Zhang was reportedly inspired by traditional Chinese ink-wash painting, and the film plays with blacks and whites and grays, with water, and, yes, with shadow. It’s an instructive departure from the fast cuts, frenetic pacing, and shaky cam of Hollywood blockbusters: Shadow unfurls like a stroke of calligraphy, elegant and deliberate. Much of the soundtrack is diegetic—zither, flute, rainfall—and its astonishing action sequences are as inexorable as the tides. By the genuinely shocking denouement (which made a little old lady in my theater gasp, “Oh my!”), you are wrung out by beauty and slaughter—but also elated, euphoric. It’s a showcase by an auteur in full command of his powers, and unlike anything that’s being made in the West. Watch it on the biggest screen you can.
— Rina Li, copy editor
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The Taste of Things (streaming on Hulu and Disney+)
These days, movies and shows about cooking tend to be vertiginous and stress-inducing. (Think: the high-velocity cursing in The Bear, or Gordon Ramsay screaming on Hell’s Kitchen, “My gran could do better! And she’s dead!”) The Taste of Things, a French movie by the director Tran Anh Hung, feels like an antidote to all of the anxious kitchen hubbub. Set in the French countryside in 1889, the film focuses on a cook named Eugénie and her boss, Dodin, longtime lovers who bond over their shared affection for food. The slow-paced, reverential cooking scenes are bathed in a golden glow. They boil and dry cabbages; they braise stingrays in milk. Years after watching this movie, I still think about one shot of a pear on a plate, which cuts to a parallel image of Eugénie’s sweaty, naked backside on a bed. Through Hung’s lens, both flesh and food are depicted as the Earth’s decadent, temporary bounty. When I left the theater, I remember wandering into my local grocery store in a daze, suddenly aware of how miraculous each swollen radish and bulbous pear appeared.
— Valerie Trapp, assistant editor
Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
The Week Ahead
- The Monsters We Make, a new book by the journalist Rachel Corbett on the rise and history of criminal profiling (out Tuesday)
- Good Fortune, a comedy film directed by Aziz Ansari about an angel who swaps the lives of a gig worker and a venture capitalist (out Friday in theaters)
- Season 3 of The Diplomat: A high-profile U.K. ambassador continues to balance her career and marriage to a controversial political star (out Thursday on Netflix)
Essay
Sela Shiloni for The Atlantic
The Director Who Fell in Love With Losers
By David Sims
The Upper West Side deli where I meet Benny Safdie is filled with a particular kind of grumpy old-school Manhattanite. They’re the type of figure who has tended to populate the filmmaker’s movies: many of them neurotic, and more concerned with finding a means to their own ends than placating the people around them. With his brother, Josh, Benny has built a career on his fascination with these occasionally surly characters, often men on the downswing. For his first solo directing effort, The Smashing Machine, Safdie focuses on a somewhat unexpected figure: a sports champion, albeit one who is learning what it’s like to fail. “I want to know what it feels like to go through that,” he told me, over a plate of eggs, discussing the film. It’s an uncomfortable portrait—of who the winner becomes when he starts to lose.
Read the full article.
More in Culture
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Photo Album
People on Stardust Racers experience more than 4 g’s of force, a level at which the human heart struggles to pump blood. (Sinna Nasseri for The Atlantic)
These photos show the very expensive, extremely overwhelming, engineered fun of theme parks.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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