THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 39 JANUARY 2020 AWARDS 1
even gainful employment aren’t
the young man’s goal so much as
salvation — or at least, mental
clarity and peace. That said, both
stories explore how easily an act
of human deception can spread
like oil until it becomes impos-
sible to control.
Rounding out the five, Les
Misérables offers a snapshot
of malcontent, contemporary
France through the eyes of three
banlieue cops looking for — of all
things — a lion cub stolen from a
circus. Will they be able to defuse
the mounting tension among
different groups while searching
for the feline? Or will everything
go belly-up? Les Misérables offers
a state-of-the-nation portrait of
France as an angry, edge-of-your-
seat experience that’s not so much
a warts-and-all portrait as a deep
study of those warts, embedded
in cracked fault lines between the
lofty Republique and its professed
but struggling ideals of freedom,
equality and brotherhood.
Ladj Ly’s debut, which, like
Parasite and Pain and Glory, was
a Cannes competition title, is
the film most directly concerned
with society’s bigger picture. The
stolen cub is the pretext and not
the subject of the film. Ly is inter-
ested in behavior, movements
and systems that clash and cause
despair, resentment and rot that
can never stay hidden for too long.
The film shares more than just
its title and locale with the iconic
novel by Victor Hugo, because in
the current world ruled by one-
percenters, there is the 99 percent1 Honeyland, also nominated for best
documentary feature, follows Macedonian
beekeeper Hatidze Muratova. 2 Corpus
Christi stars Bartosz Bielenia as a man who
masquerades as a priest. 3 Parasite, the first
Korean film to be nominated for an Oscar,
earned five additional noms. 4 Pain and Glory
stars Antonio Banderas, who also garnered
a best actor nom. 5 Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables
references Victor Hugo’s classic novel,
similarly exploring unrest in a Paris suburb.who are miserable in one or more
ways. Les Misérables represents all
but the richest and most powerful
in France and beyond
— which is to say,
almost all of us.
In this sense, Ly
and Bong tap into
very similar material.
The action in Parasite
is almost exclusively
set in two homes;
one only half above
ground and the other
towering over others
on a hill (no points for
guessing where the
rich live). But the two
homes and the fami-
lies that live in them make up a
microcosm in which the exploita-
tion of the poor by the rich leads toa desire on the part of the poor to
outdo the rich at their own game.
This isn’t even a particularly South
Korean situation, as largely uncon-
trolled globalism experiments
have led to enormous inequality in
France and elsewhere around the
world. In Parasite, there isn’t a cub
on the loose that should have been
kept caged, but other ills lurking in
the dark act as pointed metaphors
for often-invisible experiences
of exploitation and injustice. Ly’s
film is angrier and more immedi-
ate, while Bong masterfully uses
genre codes to serve up a story
about the ugly world we live in
with nuance and finesse — before
things also come to an angry boil.
Honeyland similarly keeps
its focus on a very small cast
of characters. But when new
neighbors who also hope to make
money with honey move in and
ignore Muratova’s insistence on
respecting the balance of nature
— she leaves half of the honey
for the bees and they don’t — a
disaster isn’t far off. As Sheri
Linden points out in her review,
the shambolic family, in their
improbable dwelling-on-wheels,
might as well be a multina-
tional corporation destroying a
nature sanctuary.
Les Misérables, Honeyland and
Parasite explore inequality, injus-
tice and environmental calamities
and wonder out loud how we’re
supposed to live in a world that
is unjust and seems to be get-
ting worse instead of better. Pain
and Glory and Corpus Christi join
the other three films in trying to
answer the question of how to live
between the past and the present,
between what we know, what we
believe we know and the entirely
unknown territory that is the
future. All of these nominees rep-
resent facets of the complex world
we live in. As an art form, movies,
like the one Banderas’ character
makes to understand and improve
on his own life, can offer pleasure
and food for thought in equal
measure. Though only one of
them can win, viewers will recog-
nize something of their complex
and contradictory selves onscreen
in each of them.LyAlmodóvarKomasa235