We did not love this Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, a story of an Iranian married couple who are in a stage production of Death of a Salesman and go through various situations in their personal lives. Director/writer Asghar Farhadi's A Separation won Best Foreign Film in 2012 (also nominated for Best Original Screenplay that year) and Shahab Hosseini was the leading man in both movies. Hosseini certainly gives his all, as does Taraneh Alidoosti who plays his wife as well as everyone else in the cast.
Jack and I found it overly long at 2:02, with unanswered questions and two great big plot holes on which the climax depends (ask me to tell you if you want). We have now seen three of the five nominated foreign films and liked the lighter ones (Toni Erdmann and A Man Called Ove) much better. We may skip the one about land mines but Tanna, the one about the island tribal couple running away from their arranged marriage, is on our Amazon watchlist.
Farhadi declined to attend the Oscars in protest of the president's travel ban. He sent a statement that said, in part, "My absence is out of respect for the people of my country and those of the other six nations who have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the US." We suspect the movie may have been favored because of the racial profiling of that ban.
Or perhaps it won because critics and audiences have been much more generous than we, averaging 97 and 86% respectively on Rotten Tomatoes. It has left big screens in these parts as of yesterday but you can pre-order it on Amazon.
No comments:
Post a Comment