Emmanuelle Riva — “Amour” (2012)
When Emmanuelle Riva died last month at the age of 89, Michael Haneke’s unflinching portrait of an end-of-life relationship was not her last film. But the 2012 title is such a towering piece of work that it can’t help but feel like the final of several pillars that buttress a selective, yet astonishing decades-spanning career. Debuting in Alain Resnais’ seminal “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” and working subsequently with Jean-Pierre Melville, Georges Franju and Krzystof Kieślowski among others, Riva’s performances ran the gamut from ethereal to earthy. But in Haneke’s brilliant, lacerating and painful “Amour,” she attains a degree of simplicity and honesty. Her portrayal of the deteriorating music teacher wife of Jean-Louis Trintignant‘s progressively more desperate husband, is almost unbearable. As is the irony, if you care to look at it like that, of her losing the statue to Jennifer Lawrence for “The Silver Linings Playbook” — though actually we should laud the academy for recognizing a film so very far outside its wheelhouse at all. To condemn them for failing to give Riva the Oscar would be like condemning water for being wet. Now that she has passed away, we can only imagine her performance will have increased in resonance, but we can’t be sure we’re up to the task of watching it again just yet. It is perhaps the greatest-ever evocation of the pitiless tragedy that is looking into a loved one’s eyes and finding them gone.
Marcello Mastroianni — “A Special Day” (1977)
Italian godhead Mastroianni is basically the poster boy for this list, and to date, the only actor to have been nominated three times for foreign-language films (his co-star here and elsewhere, Sophia Loren is on 2, as are Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Liv Ullman, Isabelle Adjani and Marion Cotillard). And really, any of his three nominations could go here, but we’re choosing probably the least well known, “A Special Day” purely because it’s the one that plays most interestingly against type. Here Mastroianni plays Gabriele, the potentially suicidal gay neighbor of docile housewife Antonietta (Loren), who spend an afternoon together when Antonietta’s fascist husband takes their six kids out to a rally. Mastroianni is wonderful in the role, which makes a subtle point about tolerance in being so unlike his usual Latin lover persona and yet not unlike it at all: he’s erudite, kind and persuasive toward the downtrodden Antonietta, awakening a latent resistance in her. Ettuore Scola‘s film can’t quite catch all the clubs it’s juggling — fascism, masculinity, sexism, homophobia, intellectual snobbery and so on — but Mastroianni’s wonderful, slightly broken, against-all-odds hopeful performance keeps them aloft almost to the very end.
Marion Cotillard — “Two Days, One Night” (2014)
Even in such a small pool of candidates, and an even smaller one of multiple nominees, Oscar can still have a couple of instances of converting a nod into a win at the wrong turn. It’s not that Cotillard’s breakout performance as Edith Piaf in “La Vie En Rose” isn’t good, especially in a year when the competition, apart maybe from Julie Christie in “Away From Her,” wasn’t that strong. It’s the way it’s good, and what it’s good in that make it a bit of a dull choice in retrospect: Olivier Dahan‘s fusty, traditionalist movie surrounds, and almost suffocates, her strong performance in theatricality and expected biopic beats. By contrast, her turn in the Dardennes‘ “Two Days One Night” is like an electric jolt of naturalism, in which a rivetingly de-glammed Cotillard does not simply play someone’s pain, she creates it, in a performance as real, urgent and ferociously empathy-inducing as any we’ve ever seen. As the furthest marker away from the type of role Cotillard usually takes, which factor in her beauty or mystery or charisma, her work here as an ordinary woman fighting tooth and nail to hang on to her desperately needed job, at the cost even of her pride, will always stand as the greatest testament to her range.
Demian Bichir — “A Better Life” (2011)
Having already turned heads — insomuch as that phrase suits the understated power of his performance style — with his role as a young Fidel Castro in Steven Soderbergh‘s “Che,” Demián Bichir took the lead in what was at the time a very curious project: an LA immigrant story told with a mostly hispanic cast, from the director of “About a Boy,” “American Pie” and “Twilight: New Moon”, Chris Weitz. But while it smacked of earnest good intentions, the resulting film is a modest, generous success, elevated by Bichir who finds notes to play in his character that at every turn save the film from cliche, even when its plotting threatens to bring it there. The story of a hardworking but undocumented Mexican gardener desperate to build that ‘better life’ for his son, who is becoming mixed up in local Latino gang culture, it follows a loose “Bicycle Thieves” storyline in its second half. But Bichir’s weary yet invincible decency makes it feel fresh and of itself. It’s a movie that felt topical and raw-nerve sore in 2011, before any despot had even suggested that a wall should separate the US from Mexico. We can only imagine that today, this heartfelt, intimate and moving performance piece would be seen as subversive enough to have everyone, including the audience, declared a traitor. So obviously, you should watch it.
Valentina Cortese — “Day for Night” (1974)
Unlike most extended in-jokes, Francois Truffaut’s wildly meta, moviemaking-will-eat-itself satire/parody/homage to the craft, is very funny. It’s also piercing and intellectual and silly and entertaining and sad, despite its layers of artifice (which Jean-Luc Godard despised so much he famously walked out and never spoke to Truffaut again). And one particular stroke of genius was the casting of veteran actress and erstwhile Fellini star Valentina Cortese as veteran actress and erstwhile Fellini star Séverine, the Norma Desmond-esque fading diva relegated to playing mother and wife roles. Cortese has very little screen time really — under 20 minutes in total — but Truffaut makes her presence bigger than it is by having her mentioned constantly – on PA systems, in hassled messages, in reference to her wigs, her costumes, her schedule. It means that when Cortese does appear, she has to live both up and down to Severine’s reputation and this she does astoundingly well. In one scene, Severine, in character in the terrible-looking film-within-the-film, goes through take after take of a melodramatic moment but is never able to find the right door to open at the end. Her role is so small it feels a little like she got the nomination solely for this sequence, and actually, given how gracefully she conveys Severine’s increasingly highly-strung desperation and panic, tamped down under a thin veneer of alcohol and professionalism, that’s cool with us.
Honorable Mentions
There are few enough of these that we can mention all the others: outside of the ones listed above there was Marion Cotillard’s winning turn in “La Vie En Rose“; Catalina Sandina Moreno‘s excellent, focused performance as a drug mule in “Maria Full of Grace“; Javier Bardem‘s first nod for “Before Night Falls” in 2000, as we mentioned in his entry above; and possibly controversial exclusion Roberto Benigni for “Life is Beautiful” but while we’re not as down on the “irrepressible joy amid the horrors of the Holocaust” idea as some, nor is his performance inherently better than any of the above mentioned — it’s just more.
Going further back we’ve got Massimo Troisi for the bafflingly overrated “Il Postino,” and Catherine Deneuve‘s obvious legacy nod for “Indochine.” Adjani’s second nomination came for another portrayal of a woman’s devolving sanity with “Camille Claudel“; Mastroianni picked up his third for Russian/Italian co-production “Dark Eyes“; and in 1976 alongside Ullmann’s “Face to Face” nod, Giancarlo Giannini was nominated for Lina Wertmuller’s “Seven Beauties” and Marie-Christine Barrault for the French-language “Cousin Cousine” making it a bit of a banner year for foreign-language performers chez Oscar.
In 1972, Ullmann had picked up her first Academy nomination for “The Emigrants“; prior to that, Ida Kaminska was the rare Eastern European nominee for her brilliant turn in the harrowing Czech/Slovak production “The Shop on Main Street,” and Anouk Aimee did a lovely job in the somewhat slight but heartfelt “A Man and a Woman.” Before that, we had repeat offenders Sophia Loren, for De Sica as above, but this time in “Marriage Italian Style,” and Marcello Mastroianni a couple years earlier for Pietro Germi‘s “Divorce, Italian Style,” which, if you’re in the mood to ignore the sexism of a ’60s Italian sex comedy is one of the better ones and certainly provides you with a lot of sexism to ignore.
Other that that, there’s only Melina Mercouri, who was the first person ever to be nominated for an Oscar for a foreign language film when she picked up a Best Actress nod, for Jules Dassin‘s Greek-language “Never on Sunday.” She lost to one of Elizabeth Taylor‘s less deserving performances in “Butterfield 8,” when in fact she should have lost to Shirley Maclaine in “The Apartment.” Phew! Let us know what you think of our picks, or indeed Huppert’s chances, in the comments.