From South Africa, the Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Film, 2005. That the simultaneous Oscar for the best nonforeign film went to Crash tells you pretty much all you need to know about the legitimacy of that honor. Writer and director Gavin Hood, adapting a novel by Athol Fugard, demonstrates conclusively that a film from South Africa can be as flashy and fashion-conscious as a film from anyplace else. He makes an effort, in addition, to supply a reason, a "motivation," for why a vicious cold-blooded punk who has hijacked a car with a baby in the back seat would decide to keep the baby and personally care for him. The reason, nothing to do with thoughts of ransom, is unpersuasive. And objections will not be swept away under the onslaught of pathetic details: diapering the baby in newspaper, brushing ants from his face on the first morning, carrying him around in a shopping bag, soliciting parenting lessons at gunpoint from a beautiful young mother in the neighborhood. The depiction of a segregated shantytown, for all its music-video glossiness, does provide something of what we want from a foreign film, a window on the world. If the very same scenario, however, were transplanted to Atlanta or Detroit, and if it had no subtitles for an air of rarefaction, the film might have been more easily dismissed as contrived, manipulative, maudlin. Then again, it might have won an Oscar all the same. With Presley Chweneyagae, Terry Pheto, Kenneth Nkosi, Mothusi Magano. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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