A World Without Hollywood Endings (Spoiler Alerts Ahead!)

I didn’t realize what a creature of Hollywood I am until I checked out two of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Foreign-Language Film. No question: they are worthy examples of international filmmaking, but both left me frustrated. The problem, I realized, is that neither has a Hollywood ending.

A Separation is the first Iranian film ever to win an Oscar. Not only was it nominated in the Best Foreign Film category, but it also earned a nomination for its original screenplay, a rare honor indeed for a film made in a foreign language. By no means overtly political, A Separation tells the intimate story of two married couples, whose destinies become intertwined. Still, in the course of telling a small personal story, A Separation touches on the social, political, and religious issues that are roiling Iran today.

At the heart of A Separation is a middle-class couple, not especially religious, who are on the brink of divorcing because she wants to give their eleven-year-old daughter a better life in America and he feels an obligation to his elderly father, caught in the grip of Alzheimer’s disease. When wife Simin moves out, husband Nader hires a housekeeper – a devout chador-wearing young woman – to tend his father while he goes to work. Complications, including a miscarriage, end up embroiling two families in a series of lies, half-truths, angry outbursts, and appeals for legal justice. Without giving away all the twists and turns of the plot, let me simply say that the film ends with a young girl asked to decide with which of her two parents she wants to live.

I waited breathlessly for her answer. I didn’t get one. The film was over. Which is probably terrific in prompting post-film discussions, but I went alone.

Footnote, from Israel, is as visually inventive as A Separation is austere. The story of father-and-son Talmudic scholars may sound dry, but there are moments of great wit here, as well as a profound understanding of human nature. Eliezer Shkolnik is a zealous researcher, and a curmudgeon with little use for his fellow Talmudists. These include son Uriel, a much more expansive thinker, as a well as guy who's quite comfortable shmoozing his fellow academics. With a major prize at stake, all hell breaks loose. At base, Footnote is an exploration of the intricate bond between father and son. It climaxes just as the big prize is about to be awarded. We in the audience know who is going to receive the prize, and who really deserves it. The characters know it too.

I was certain the film was moving toward a satisfying twist that would right all wrongs and end in a heartfelt reconciliation. So much for my Hollywood expectations. Footnote simply left the viewer hanging. I waited through the credits, all in Hebrew, hoping SOMETHING would resolve itself. Nope!

The one foreign film nominee I saw that conformed to my Hollywood expectation of a happy (or at least a tidy) ending was In Darkness, a Holocaust drama from Poland. It’s the true story of a small group of Jews, facing Nazi extermination, who are hidden beneath the streets of Lvov by a Polish sewer worker who seems to have mixed motives. There are horrors aplenty, but the film ends with the survivors emerging at last into sunlight. The joy with which they’re greeted by their former neighbors is pure Hollywood, though this film would have been heartbreaking without it. The ending’s not entirely upbeat, though. A caption tells us about the real-life fate of that good-hearted sewer worker – not so Hollywood after all.