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Agnieszka Holland's chances for taking home the Oscar this year are high as In Darkness vies as one of the stronger contenders for Best Foreign Language Film, but will the Holocaust drama win out against Iran's A Separation and Israel's Footnote?
In Darkness, set in the WW-II city of Lviv (in present-day Ukraine), follows the harrowing plight of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. The film follows Leopold Socha, a sewer worker, petty thief and marginally anti-semitic. He is the unlikely hero, but gets involved with a number of Jews trying to escape deportation, or worse. He eventually hides a group in the sewers, the dank and claustrophobic passages he knows so well. Based on a true story The Sewers of Lvov, written by Robert Marshall, the script first landed in Agnieszka Holland's lap eight years ago. She has been trying to get it off the ground since.
There are few better directors to handle the script, with a mixed Polish and Jewish background - Agnieszka Holland's mother was Polish and her father Jewish, whose extended family was mostly killed by the Nazis. The Holocaust has long had a place very close to the her heart, with earlier films Angry Harvest (1985) and Europa, Europa (1990) tackling this heavy subject matter and gaining the director her two previous Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Screenplay, respectively. Holland wasn't initially eager to take up a third film on the Holocaust, but scriptwriter David Shamoon kept pursuing the subject until she finally gave in. Then the picture began to crystallise in her imagination. As the director told Anne Thompson on her Indiewire blog Thompson on Hollywood:
[When] I read the script for the first time, I understood that it's quite special, even if I knew a lot of Holocaust stories. Some of them had been even more traumatic and more incredible. But I didn't want to go to those places. I did two movies connected to the subject before, and I knew that it's always difficult and in some way painful, so I didn't want to let my imagination work too quickly. I didn't want to get attached to that. And at first I was refusing it.
The film is also shot in several different languages: Polish, Yiddish, German and Ukrainian, which raises the level of authenticity, but also may alienate some viewers who aren't accustomed to watching subtitled films. Critics have also remarked how layered the characters are in the film, with realistic portrayals of both Jews and Poles, unlike most Hollywood productions that often present flat, black-and-white character profiles of good guys vs. bad guys, as Holland herself remarked in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. The characters are "sometimes generous, sometimes selfish, sometimes bad, sometimes loving" thanks to the efforts of David Shamoon. Shamoon, who is also a Jew, told the LA Times that he was "really tired of Jews being depicted as victims".
Shooting much of the film in real sewers was another obstacle in the production, although the director would have it no other way, wanting to depict as much of the squalor of the underground passages as possible. The director, together with cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska, decided to shoot the 'sewer' scenes on a RED camera. This in itself created some technical difficulties as the dark surroundings of the underground sewers do no allow enough light to be registered by the camera's digital sensor, as opposed to film, which can be 'pushed' in post-production. There was some heated debate on whether 'pushing' would be possible, in response to which Dylewska insisted "nothing is impossible. We have to push it" (Thompson on Hollywood). Their gamble proved lucky, with trade publication Variety recently naming the cinematographer among their top ten to watch in recognition of her challenge in filming In Darkness 'in the dark' and the unique effect it created.
Despite critical acclaim that Holland's film has garnered from international critics - Time Magazine has written that "real life brims with startling atrocities as well as clichés, and this film is full of both", Entertainment Weekly calling it "a daringly murky-looking movie that demands viewers enter the void" and the New York Times reporting it "suspenseful, horrifying and at times intensely moving" - not everyone is bowled over. Roger Ebert recently described it as "another movie in which Jews escape death in the Holocaust through the actions of a gentile with a conscience" and Variety has complained that with the exception of "movie-star handsome Mundek Margulies (German-born, internationally recognized Benno Furmann), the characters are flat as shadows". The Village Voice moaned that "Every Holocaust movie, however hair-raising, essentially thrums the same self-sacrifice-versus-self-preservation chord. It's not fair, but there it is: We've been here before". In short - the critics will tell you that the purported originality of In Darkness is not altogether original.
For In Darkness to win the much-coveted award, it has to fight off the competition, which this year include Iran's A Separation, directed by Asghar Farhadi, and Israel's Footnote, written and directed by written and directed by Joseph Cedar. A Separation clearly stands out at the critics' favourite. As the LA Time's Gina McIntyre and Nicole Sperling put it:
A Separation is considered the favorite in the category. The film, which nabbed a Golden Globe last week, centers on a couple who must decide whether to leave Iran to offer their child a better life, or stay to take care of an ailing parent. The film has been universally embraced by critics: It currently has a 99% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Iranian film is also a favourite of online bookmakers betfair which give it odds of 1.20, much higher than the 7.84 for In Darkness at the time of this article's publication. The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips writes
Farhadi is enjoying his greatest international exposure and success with A Separation, which has won practically every award for which it has been nominated on the international festival circuit, and picked up a Golden Globe to boot last week. It is the front-runner for this year's Academy Award in the foreign-language feature category.
The spirit is perhaps best captured by Sarah D. Bunting, who wrote on Indiewire/Press Play:
[In Darkness is] a truly well built story, frustrating and thrilling, controlled but not rigid. I don't think it wins its category, but it's very fine work.
The 84th Annual Academy Awards will be held on the 26th of February, 2012. Janusz Kamiński, who recently took home the Critics Choice Award for Cinematography for War Horse, directed by Steven Spieldberg is also up for the Oscar. Janusz Kamiński's already won two Oscars for his cinematography for Steven Spielberg films, for Schindler's List in 1994 and for Saving Private Ryan in 1999. War Horse follows the trials and tribulations of a young Brit and his beloved horse in the midst of World War I. The film has also received nominations for Best Art Direction, Music (Original Score), Sound Editing and Best Picture.
Author: Roberto Galea
Editor: Agnieszka Le Nart