Why the multiplex went multilingual

Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas star in Sentimental Value. Photo / Kasper Tuxen, Cannes Film Festival

Oscar watchers expect this year’s best picture award to go to one of these cinematic spectaculars: Ryan Coogler’s genre-busting Sinners; the second lavish instalment of John Chu’s Wicked; Chloé Zhao’s sumptuous adaptation of the celebrated novel Hamnet; or One Battle After Another, the thrilling, violent and terribly topical epic from auteur Paul Thomas Anderson.

Then again, the trophy might go to a family drama that may have cost less than the catering budget on one of those other contenders, directed by someone from a country with a population smaller than Wisconsin’s.

If Sentimental Value wins, it won’t mark the first time a small-scale arthouse flick upset the heavy hitters. In the past decade, Anora, Nomadland and Moonlight all pulled it off. But they were all in English. Is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences ready to crown a US$8 million ($14.2m) film that’s mostly in Norwegian? In a word, ja.

For starters, the impeccably acted Sentimental Value, is a terrific movie. As he proved in his 2021 tour de force The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier is an expert portraitist, specialising in difficult people.

Sentimental Value takes silly, surprising and shattering turns as the writer-director cracks open a particularly prickly family. Nora (Renate Reinsve, the Worst Person star), a successful stage actor, and her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), would like to figure out what to do with the family home after their mother’s death. Their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a film director past his prime, turns up with other plans.

Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World. Photo / Supplied

He’d like to shoot a movie about his childhood in the house. And he wants Nora to star as his suicidal mother.

If that sounds too, well, Scandinavian, several other excellent foreign-language films in theatres now or coming soon might catch your eye this subtitle season.

A brilliant pair of movies describe life under dictatorships: It Was Just an Accident, which was shot in and around Tehran in secret by acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi, imagines an encounter between a dissident and the man he thinks tortured him in jail.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sprawling The Secret Agent, stars an excellent Wagner Moura as a leftist professor hiding from Brazil’s military regime in Recife in the 1970s.

If creeping authoritarianism is too topical for your taste, you’ll surely enjoy No Other Choice, a hilarious, if occasionally bloody, satire of office life in the age of AI from Park Chan-wook, the South Korean auteur whose Oldboy has become a cult classic. Neon Rated LLC is distributing all of them.

No Other Choice, directed by Park Chan-wook, is a satire of office life in the age of AI.

Foreign-language films have had fans in the US since at least 1948, when Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (a truly perfect movie) enraptured stateside cineastes. But over the past decade, international films, as the Oscars now call them, have moved towards the centre of the cultural conversation.

This is partly thanks to streaming services supplanting studios and networks at the heart of the industry: striving to satisfy the insatiable global appetite for films and series, Netflix Inc. and its peers increasingly cross-market international content to international viewers.

Hollywood conquered the world in the 20th century. Now the world is returning the favour, and American audiences love it, bingeing Squid Game, Babylon Berlin and Lupin.

In the film world, two recent changes at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences have cemented this shift. First, in 2009, Ampas increased the number of slots for best picture nominees. This helped recognise more blockbusters – your Dunes, Black Panthers and Top Guns – with the less lucrative, more experimental films that typically win most of the big awards.

A few years after this shift, the #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo movements put pressure on the academy to focus on inclusion of another kind. In 2012, Ampas members were 94% white and 74% male, according to the Los Angeles Times. Four years later, 46% of members were women, and 41% were people of colour. With a broader, more international membership, the academy now regularly taps a lot more foreign-language movies with the studio blockbusters and artistic independent films.

Before 2017 only 10 films not mostly in English had ever been nominated for best picture. Since 2018, 12 have. Under the new regime, Parasite, a Korean-language comedy-thriller, went all the way at the 2020 Oscars and won the big prize. Recently voted the best film of the century, Bong Joon Ho’s masterpiece might not even have managed a nomination a decade earlier.

This has given rise to a new genre altogether: the polyglot production, a film that’s not only in a different language but in several. The musical narco-drama Emilia Pérez – in Spanish, English and French – earned 13 Oscar nominations last year. (And just as many controversies, which for better or worse sunk its chances.)

Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón in Emilia Pérez (2024). Photo / Netflix

The year before, Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet’s domestic thriller – in French, English and German – got five nominations and won best original screenplay. Neon (who else?) released a riveting trailer cut together entirely from the film’s English dialogue. In Anatomy, the different languages are no mere gimmick: they highlight the conflicting versions of the truth at the movie’s puzzling core.

A lot of Sentimental Value is likewise in English, thanks to Elle Fanning. She plays Rachel, an American movie star Gustav turns to when Nora says she won’t be in his film. Trier finds a perfect metaphor for the director’s estrangement from his daughter, splitting the movie into different tongues. If the choice also makes the film more appealing to American audiences, so be it.

More and more acclaimed US productions are multilingual too, but the intent is less intellectual than political. Minari (2020) and Past Lives (2023) were in Korean and English. Everything Everywhere All at Once, the best picture winner in 2023, was in English, Mandarin and Cantonese.

Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

For Steven Spielberg’s reimagined West Side Story (2021), screenwriter Tony Kushner got help from the Puerto Rican librettist Lin-Manuel Miranda to give the Puerto Rican characters lyrics in the language they would have actually spoken.

This year, One Battle After Another, a broadside against US border policy, features a diverse cast speaking English and Spanish. Half of the country is having a breakdown about immigrants – the other half wants to make and watch movies about them.

It all makes for a great time at the movies. And a great time to dust off your Duolingo.