Word: conquerors
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Normally, watching the awarding of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film is a painful and disappointing experience. Instead of rewarding excellent or innovative films, the stolid voters usually opt for something ponderous and portentous--recall the year that the excruciatingly tedious "Pelle the Conqueror' won over "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." So it was refreshing to watch this year's Oscar go to the Spanish entry, Fernando Trueba's "Belle Epoque." Trueba's film isn't necessarily a cinematic masterpiece, something like "The Piano." But given Trueba's more modest goal of entertainment, the film succeeds quite...
...this two-hour film, Isabel Allende's complex, stylish novel has of necessity been stripped to its working parts. Yet the thing works in its goofy way, mainly because Bille August (of Pelle the Conqueror) is a man of apparently dauntless conviction. He has written and directed every scene with serene authority, somehow compelling your belief in what he's doing through his own sublime self-confidence...
Here the film disintegrates into a tangled web of competing story lines. August, whose past successes include, a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1988 ("Pelle the Conqueror") and top prizes at Cannes ("Pelle the Conqueror" and "Best Intentions") was chosen by Allende to write and direct "The House of the Spirits." August described adapting Allende's dense novel as "a bit like being a boy in a candy shop," but he seems to have chosen all the wrong pieces for this feature-length film...
...Village for anything," he said. "You get up in the morning and you see some of the best athletes in the world going for jogs or eating breakfast. It's indescribable!" A few days later, the No. 1 seed was knocked out of both doubles and singles, and his conqueror, the Swiss giant Marc Rosset, was looking pleasantly bewildered. "I like the Village so much," said the unseeded Rosset, who went on to win the gold, "maybe I'm going to buy a flat in the Village...
...Best Intentions -- written by Bergman but directed by Bille August, the Dane who made Pelle the Conqueror -- proves you can't keep a solemn Swede down. It recounts the first married years of Bergman's parents, whose later lives he dramatized in his family-album movie, Fanny and Alexander. In retrospect we can see that Bergman was unlikely to retire to some Fort Lauderdale of the soul; familiar demons would fill his afternoon naps with nightmares. And with the unfinished business of putting his parents on paper. Somebody else would put them on film...