Paul Giamatti is the Ricardo Darín of American cinema. Like Darín, he has a great ability to embody the average guy, who moves in often hostile environments displaying no little sarcasm and a wit that is proof against the attacks of the powerful. Like the Argentine, Giamatti is well liked and the mere presence of him in a film constitutes an attraction to go see it.
Without departing from this recognizable starting position, but taking it to perfection, Giamatti achieves in Los que se quenta an authentic interpretive tour de force that has already earned him a Golden Globe and it would be strange if it does not bring him closer to the Oscars.
Alexander Payne's is a “campus film,” a genre with almost as much tradition as campus novels. This classics professor, Hunham – an anagram of human? – Grumpy and with a lazy eye, he is suffering from trimethylaminuria, an enzymatic system defect also known as fish odor syndrome due to the unpleasant aroma it produces.
Clad in a Montgomery coat – which owes its name to the famous general – he faces the tough task of taking charge of an almost empty Barton Academy in the middle of Christmas.
The critic Richard Brody has pointed out in The New Yorker that the director "with intelligence and affection" shuffles a lot of clichés in order to recreate the style of an American film from the early seventies, and thereby reflect a time that is "simpler and more human” (although we know that no past time was better, and certainly not that one either). It even presents an image with artificial grain – it has been shot digitally – and the atmosphere and spaces indeed recall the beginning of Carnal Knowledge, by Mike Nichols (1971), a much harsher and sordid film than Payne's but with an undeniable period flavor. , where Jack Nicholson wore a Montgomery dress similar (in dark) to Giamatti's.
Those Who Stay, well served by the secondary characters of Angus, a troubled student (Dominic Sessa), and Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), the black cook who lost a son in Vietnam, is a sympathetic and tender production as well. nostalgic, which raises morale.
Also nice and to a certain extent also nostalgic is A low fire. An initial sequence where the preparation of a meal without any special incidents, lasting for twenty minutes, manages to maintain a hypnotized attention to the details of how the ingredients are arranged, cut or boiled, already signals a special tempo.
The Vietnamese Anh Hùng Tran could not have directed a more French work, celebrating the country's haute cuisine, the myth of the country mansion, sentimental freedom and the visuality of impressionist painting. And chaired by a great star like Juliette Binoche, along with her ex-partner in real life, the always solid Benoît Magimel.
In The Snow Society we admire the ability of J.A. Bayona to create a dazzling and epic visual proposal of exciting realism and to bring new generations closer to one of the great stories of the second half of the 20th century, established in its day by that masterpiece of journalism that is the book ¡Viven! by Piers Paul Read.
Those of us who are familiar with it would possibly have appreciated that he expanded the story by incorporating other more innovative elements from the later book by Pablo Vierci on which it is based, such as following the trajectory of the survivors up to their current lives.
Finally, a couple of writers in crisis star in Anatomy of a Fall, by Justine Triet, another of the most talked about films of the season. There is a lot of snow, as in Payne and Bayonne; attractive performances, especially by Sandra Hüller, and a somewhat pretentious judicial suspense plot that I couldn't quite believe. It is more than two hours long like the previous three, and it is the one that seemed the longest to me.
