I first noticed it while watching Finland’s Oscar submission “Fallen Leaves” in Los Angeles a few years ago. I think I was the only Finn in the audience. Americans around me watched the film mostly in silence, indifferent — or oblivious — to the deadpan Finnish humor. Then: a scene where the leads visit a cinema. The camera pans to the screen. It’s a movie within a movie: Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die,” starring Bill Murray and Adam Driver. Briefly, the Americans take over, mowing down zombies with shotguns and machetes. The camera looks back on the straight-faced Finns. It’s a comedic cultural contrast. Moreover, for American viewers, it’s a grounding moment of familiarity: recognizable humor, tempo, idiom. Watching these Americans in action, the audience in Los Angeles erupted in laughs.
Moments of Americana in foreign-language films are common cinematic devices. They can temporarily make the foreign feel local and vice versa — sharpening a movie’s native contours while helping to entice bigger American and Americanized audiences, too. The trick has felt ubiquitous, and more subtle, in recent years. There’s the eccentric cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” that’s central to the Academy Award-winning French film “Anatomy of a Fall,” or the American classic movie “Jaws,” which informs this year’s best-picture nominee, the Brazilian movie “The Secret Agent.” The Oscars seem to respond best to international movies that have slivers of America in them.
The Academy Awards have become notably more international in recent years. What crystallized with Bong Joon Ho’s win for the 2019 black comedy “Parasite” — the first non-English-language film to collect best picture — has since accelerated, with foreign-language movies breaking Oscar records and at least one foreign-language film making it into the best-picture nominations each year. (Before “Parasite,” only eight non-English-language foreign films had been nominated for best picture in all of Oscars history.) Many people attribute the change to the fact that 22 percent of voters for the awards now live outside the United States. Yet that explanation presupposes some strange, organized global Oscars mafia that exclusively votes for foreign-language films. Instead, American cinema seems to be growing international — with crews chasing foreign tax rebates and first-generation immigrants stacking Oscar nominations — while international cinema (or at least the version of it reaching the United States) is Americanizing, too.
References to Americana aren’t the only trend. American characters in Oscar-contending foreign-language films also offer clues to America’s changing role in film. U.S. productions like “Past Lives” and “Minari” chronicle protagonists who have immigrated to the United States, while works like the Norwegian film “Sentimental Value” place American characters in settings abroad. What emerges is a new archetype: the Complicated American.
It goes something like this: Americans are supporting cast, and as such, they are catalysts for change. They bring conflict. They intrude: They are factory owners doing layoffs (“No Other Choice”), the new foreign husband (“Past Lives”) or members of the nosy local congregation (“Minari”). They disrupt everyday life and ideas of home. In Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” an American actress studies the Nordic characters’ childhood house as she readies to appear — in place of the Norwegian daughter — in the father’s autobiographical film. These Complicated Americans, then, invert ideas often thought of as American prejudices: They are the foreigners who take something away, replace someone else or disturb tradition.
Many of these characters are off-center from traditional depictions, in both U.S. and international cinema, of Americans in foreign settings as saviors, rescuers or liberators, or alternatively as one-note colonial “bad guys.” They’re portrayed as clumsy and clueless, blunt and direct, often opportunistic and fake, but as juxtapositions they also mirror for others what’s real and authentic, wise and true — about life, work or family. As foils, the Americans push the main characters closer to home and cultural roots. A few pre-empt criticism, like the American husband in “Past Lives”: “Childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later only to realize they were meant for each other,” he chuckles. “In the story I would be the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny.” “Shut up,” his wife says with a laugh. It’s funny — precisely because the film never makes clear whether it’s true.
The presence of Americans like these results in a distinct genre of foreign-language film, one neither fawning nor overly critical of the country from which most Academy Award voters hail. While Trier’s previous film in Norwegian, with no American characters, earned two Oscar nominations, “Sentimental Value” has landed nine, breaking out beyond the international-feature category into best picture. The American lead, Elle Fanning, is up for best supporting actress; three Nordic actors are nominated for awards, too.
International films have always been challenging proposals to any outside audience. They ask viewers to reconsider the familiar: not just language but qualities like cinematic pacing, humor, even how characters relate to one another. Most of the time, this has proved burdensome in the Oscars race. Half the battle has been getting voters to watch a film. To win, audiences and critics generally need to like the movie too. In the book “Hit Makers,” the journalist Derek Thompson argues that successful creators often combine something already recognizable with something new and boundary-pushing. Reviewing “Sentimental Value,” the film critic Justin Chang said he liked Fanning “the best,” noting that “her character has a bracing and very American directness that cuts through all the wry Nordic reserve.” (As a Nordic person who grew up enveloped by American culture, I felt the inverse: I liked the familiar reserve and experienced it in sharper focus.)
The film concludes, however, with the filmmaker shooting his film in Norwegian, not English. There’s a message of cultural independence, inviting international viewers — and American ones, too — to find resolution in turning away from American influence. The Complicated Americans underline world power in some familiar ways: celebrities towering over people in airbrushed commercials (“Sentimental Value”), suited figures disappearing into S.U.V.s (“No Other Choice”). The Americans personify large, opaque systems, like capitalism or artificial intelligence. References to industry-upending streaming platforms (“Sentimental Value”) or the motif of the American movie inside a foreign movie (“Fallen Leaves,” “The Secret Agent”) go beyond homage. These foreign films seem to be looking directly at the American viewer, saying, We watch you, but we also see you.
Do Oscar nominations for international cinema and the increased willingness to interrogate American characters from many angles mean the declining hegemony of American film? Most likely not in the short term. Most major producers, distributors, platforms, studios and tech giants still reside disproportionately within the United States. Even as the spotlight onscreen begins to migrate to other cultures, Americans still largely determine for the world which international films gain traction.
And welcoming global flair in from the margins very likely makes the culture of American film richer. International filmmakers and actors usher in more creative experimentation to Hollywood and could even strengthen America’s global influence by creating new ways for its stars and styles to spread out. American Oscar winners are turning outward themselves: Brendan Fraser learned some Japanese for “Rental Family,” while Jodie Foster uses her fluent French in “A Private Life.” Of course, Americans still have the luxury of choosing international cinema when it suits, while international filmmakers still have to untangle and understand themselves in relation to America. Films like “Sentimental Value” and “Past Lives” feel visceral and real because they make that struggle a driving force.
These movies ask: What role does America play in our lives now? Do we let it in or resist it? How do we relate to it? Can we criticize it? And at what moment does it get too powerful, artificial or dangerous for our autonomy and identity? Those are questions the world, and America, are asking, too. Being forthright could hurt Oscar chances, so the filmmakers deflect and depict. In “Anatomy of a Fall,” a loud cover of an American rap song masks possible murder. And in “The Secret Agent,” the cinema screening “Jaws” ultimately becomes a blood bank. Make of that what you will.
Kalle Oskari Mattila is a writer from Finland based in Los Angeles.
Source photographs for illustration above: Kasper Tuxen/Neon; James Lisle/Searchlight Pictures; A24/Everett Collection; Pablo Porciunla/AFP, via Getty Images; Andreas Rentz/Getty Images; Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images; DeAgostini/Getty Images; Universal History Archive/Getty Images;
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