Culture controls cinema

The best way to experience a country is to walk its streets, eat its food and have an amusing misadventure that involves stolen passports and mistaken identities. But when a plane ticket isn’t affordable, foreign cinema is the next best thing.

Though film has existed as a means of entertainment and an exploration of art, it has also expressed a country’s vision of itself. To watch foreign films is to see an aspect of a country’s soul and history.

Watch enough of a country’s cinema and the viewer begins to see common threads. Korea, for example, seems to have a penchant for gory revenge films. Jee-woon Kim’s 2010 I Saw the Devil follows a secret agent’s gory manhunt for his fiancée’s killer as the secret agent becomes a monster himself.

Revenge films in Korea, however, are rarely about simple vengeance; they traditionally concern either family or relationships. In Chan-wook Park’s 2002 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, a brother goes on the warpath after black market thugs swindle him out of his money and a kidney, which he sold to pay for his sister’s own kidney transplant. Korean culture places a huge emphasis on family. Who says family values can’t have some carnage on the side?

Cinema also expresses a country’s ideals, as in 1950’s Cyrano de Bergerac (remade in 1990). The romantic panache synonymous with France is clear in this classic, a swashbuckling drama of a man who romances his ladylove through the letters of another man. And 2006’s quixotic Paris Je t’aime, a compilation of short films, is full of whimsical French passion.

Whether it’s death as a cowboy or a nuclear mime family, these French films are love letters to Paris. Recall, however, the French riots not so long ago, where the most passionate thing burning was cars, not romance. A film like 1995’s La Haine shows a completely different side of France, rife with racial and social tensions and far away from baguettes and billet-doux.

Foreign cinema even exhibits a country’s pride. With China, much of this pride lies in its past, as seen in wuxia films, such as 2002’s Hero with Jet Li and 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with Chow Yun-Fat. Though it’s unlikely Chinese heroes performed physics-breaking ballet battles in the woods, the films encompass a time period when China was the most advanced nation in the world.

Other times, a film set in an historical era can be a reflective and critical look at a former time period, such as the 2006 Spanish dark fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth. A look past the fairies getting their heads bitten off finds a brutal look at Franco-era Spain.

But just as The Hangover II does not comprise the pulsing spirit of America, not every foreign film cares to condense a country’s psyche. Take Russia; it is one of the largest countries in the world with rulers as different as Catherine the Great and Joseph Stalin, neither of whom was Russian.

One of Russia’s highest-grossing films, Timur Bekmambetov’s 2006 Day Watch, is a frenetic beast of good vs. evil, high-flying CGI and howling Euro rock. Yet it keeps its philosophical focus on desperate hopes and failed dreams — think Dostoevsky with less eloquence and more vampires.

On the flip side, Joseph Stalin’s favorite film was a song-and-dance comedy called Volga-Volga.

To look at one or two foreign films as a complete portrait of a country is stopping short. Film is an international form of self-expression, not a direct representation of a country or its ideals. Given some nations’ penchants for civil wars, a country’s people doesn’t always have the same values. But delve into a country’s cinema and soon you will start to see common threads that weave together to give you an organic look at a country.