Fjord and La Bola Negra Make Best Picture a More Interesting Race

Mungiu begins from a proposition almost everyone can accept: children should be protected. The drama develops through the fact that agreement on the proposition does not establish agreement on what protection requires. A household, a teacher and child-protection authorities can attach different actions to the same word.

The discovery of bruises gives the investigation a concrete starting point. That detail is essential. The situation cannot responsibly be described only as a tolerant society misunderstanding a religious family. Concern about discipline has its own force. Sympathy for parents facing separation should not erase the reason somebody became concerned about the children.

Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve make the parents' love and defensiveness coexist. Mihai's explanations are tied to his understanding of the authority he should possess within the home. Lisbet's return to a Norwegian community does not make belonging simple. A familiar place can become unfamiliar when its institutions begin looking at your family.

These performances provide one of the film's clearest awards arguments. The actors have to keep conviction connected to people rather than turning each response into a declaration of a position. A parent can feel injured by scrutiny and still need scrutiny. Stan and Reinsve make room for that difficulty.

Mungiu's setting adds another scale. The landscape looks magnificent and ordered, but it cannot adjudicate what the people beneath it should do. Its beauty gives the community a powerful appearance without making the appearance evidence of moral correctness. A family can seem small within the image without making every institution around it automatically wise.

For Best Picture, the value is the film's capacity to keep a painful public question attached to daily life. Decisions do not become important only when someone speaks dramatically about them. They acquire force through routines, observations and procedures. Mungiu asks the audience to remain with that process long enough to feel how difficult it can become to reverse.

TSR's review also identified the risk in the construction. A drama about competing authorities can arrange its people so neatly that apparent ambiguity conceals a preferred answer. Withholding a final verdict does not, on its own, establish balance. The selection of incidents and the treatment of participants have already done part of the judging.

The children's experiences are the strongest way to test that problem. Five siblings do not constitute one undifferentiated claim about family life. Age, dependence and friendships change what parental instruction means. The relationship between Elia and Noora can complicate the adults' explanations, but only if the girls are permitted lives that extend beyond illustrating an argument.

That is a substantial reservation, and an awards case should retain it. Mungiu's reputation cannot guarantee that every person on screen escapes the demands of the thesis. The Palme d'Or is a reason to pay attention to the film, not a reason to treat objections as failures of understanding.

Fjord belongs in the conversation because the problem survives examination. We can question the drama's arrangement and still recognize the force of the performances and the difficulty of the subject. That is more useful than packaging the film as either an important masterpiece or a reactionary provocation before describing how it works.

The best advocacy would point toward particular achievements: the parents' contradictory feelings, the way procedure acquires power and the challenge of keeping the children's needs distinct from the adults' accounts. Those are things a viewer can discuss. “Timely” is a weaker argument because almost any film about an institution can be made timely by a sufficiently broad headline.

La Bola Negra approaches history with a completely different temperament. Its three periods—1932, 1937 and 2017—allow shame, desire and incomplete records to move across generations. Los Javis do not make the past look quiet because information about it has been lost. They make the film crowded, musical and conspicuously alive.

That choice gives the scale a purpose. Queer history can survive in fragments, evasions and records that refused to name what was happening. The film answers the smallness of those surviving traces with an enormous canvas. Its excess becomes an argument about what deserves to occupy a major image.

The wartime relationship is especially important to the emotional case. Guitarricadelafuente's Sebastián and Miguel Bernardeau's Rafael encounter one another within an unequal and dangerous arrangement. Attraction cannot remove the conditions that make the encounter possible. Their scenes carry fear, curiosity and tenderness without giving any one feeling the power to make the others disappear.

TSR's review found this the strongest section. It gives the historical design intimate weight. The large film does not become moving only because it names a large injustice. It becomes moving because the actors make a particular connection possible while letting us see how little future that connection may be permitted.

The social-club ritual in the 1932 strand offers another kind of force. Exclusion occurs through a respectable procedure. The small act acquires an enormous consequence for the person being rejected. The film places that tidy cruelty beside a much less tidy insistence that the lives it excluded should be seen.

The contemporary strand adds the difficulty of reconstruction. An inheritance and an incomplete record can create an obligation to look backward without guaranteeing that every missing part can be recovered. Los Javis' willingness to imagine within that absence is part of the film's ambition and part of the risk it asks viewers to accept.

An awards conversation sometimes assigns austerity an automatic advantage. A film looks restrained, so it is presumed serious. A film is colorful, musical or melodramatic, so its seriousness has to be defended. Fjord and La Bola Negra are useful beside one another because they expose how inadequate that shortcut is.

La Bola Negra's cabaret and crowded compositions are not simply relief from the historical story. They belong to its claim that desire, performance and community cannot be separated from the history of repression. Penélope Cruz's presence gives glamour a dramatic and political function, making visibility part of what the film is arguing for.

Gris Jordana's cinematography supports that claim through the relation between scale and bodies. The review praised the film's ability to move through large historical environments and still attend to a face. Its production design and costumes distinguish periods without requiring the people to become museum exhibits. Those craft achievements give the Best Picture argument more substance than a statement of noble intent.

The weaknesses remain. At 157 minutes, the film can repeat a meaning already made visible. Its later symbolism sometimes strains toward monument, as though a private sorrow must also certify the importance of art, memory and nation. The same appetite that makes the movie exciting can make it insist too strongly on how the audience ought to receive it.

Calling that excess purposeful does not settle whether every instance works. A strategy can have a good reason and produce an uneven result. The stronger awards case acknowledges the difference. The film's imperfections are related to its reach, but relation is not automatic absolution.

What survives is the conviction that these lives should be given popular cinema's full resources. That conviction produces images, performances and passages that deserve to remain in the conversation even when the overall result is less controlled than our highest-rated films. Best Picture advocacy should be able to recognize an ambitious uneven work without describing it as secretly flawless.

TSR's ballot places La Bola Negra close to The Odyssey and includes Fjord among the contenders. Those positions describe our preferences within a developing field. They do not establish an Academy result, an official nomination or either film's final eligibility in a separate category. Best Picture discussion should not be confused with a country's International Feature selection.

There is already concrete festival evidence behind the attention. Cannes awarded Fjord the Palme d'Or and Los Javis a shared Best Director prize for La Bola Negra. Netflix has also confirmed La Bola Negra's Toronto People's Choice victory, its San Sebastián audience award and Spain's International Feature submission. These are distinct achievements: jury recognition, audience recognition and a national selection. None is an Oscar nomination, but together they give Los Javis' film several kinds of support to carry into the fall.

The point of putting the films together is to make the preference more articulate. The Odyssey makes physical scale bear the weight of guilt and homecoming. Fjord tests the claims people make when they believe they know how a family should live. La Bola Negra makes erased desire visible through the force of a large, imperfect historical spectacle.

These are different achievements, not successive attempts to make the same kind of prestige film. Their presence gives the race a range of cinematic experience worth defending. It also gives us different kinds of failure to discuss: compression, overdetermined moral design, repeated symbolism. The reservations tell us what each film is trying to accomplish and where the attempt becomes strained.

An interesting Best Picture season should permit those arguments to continue. We do not need Fjord or La Bola Negra to dislodge The Odyssey before they become valuable. We need them to make choosing The Odyssey mean something more specific. A frontrunner becomes easier to understand when the films beside it offer serious reasons to choose differently.