Editor's note: If you don't want to romp in the snow at the Sundance Film Festival over the next week, there's a sunnier film festival on the West Coast.
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. -- It's only appropriate that one of the better showcases for foreign-language films, the Palm Springs International Film Festival, takes place in an upscale oasis in the middle of the desert.The exotic locale is not unlike the market these days for subtitled movies: a little green surrounded by miles of wasteland.
Foreign-language films are enjoying an upswing, paced by the critical and box-office success of Italy's "Life Is Beautiful," which has a strong shot at becoming that rare subtitled film to get a best-picture Academy Award nomination.
In some respects, it has been a pretty good decade for foreign-language films (subtitled or dubbed into English, as differentiated from foreign films originally shot in English from such countries as England, Australia or New Zealand.)
Five of the top-grossing foreign-language films ever were released in the past decade: "Il Postino," "Like Water for Chocolate," "Life Is Beautiful," "Shall We Dance" and "Cinema Paradiso." But one look at the lineup of this month's Palm Springs festival and the problem is clear. For every "Life Is Beautiful" and "Central Station," there are Oscar-submitted films from the Philippines, Hong Kong, Venezuela, China, Hungary, Norway and Iceland that nobody in the United States ever heard of -- and likely never will.
It's becoming an old story.
Fewer foreign films are being released, and the pictures still tend to play mainly in the big cities. The reasons for the declining numbers range from the economic (the films lack an afterlife in video or television) to the artistic (the surge in edgier English-language independent films has given audiences the kind of movies they used to get only from overseas).
Either way, many of the new crop of foreign-language films tend to be considerably less adventurous than the works of Francois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini of the late 1950s through 1970s.
"The foreign-language film business is, unfortunately, dying," said David Dinerstein, co-president of Paramount Classics, the art house division of Paramount Pictures.
Dying, but not dead.
Consider that Paramount Classics made as its first purchase this year a foreign-language film, Yugoslavia's "The Powder Keg," a tough look at Serbian life and one of two films from that country to obtain American distribution. The other is "Black Cat, White Cat" (which is playing at the Sundance Film Festival this month).
And as Miramax Films has shown, a studio can make good money from subtitled films. All five of the top foreign language films were released by the Disney-owned studio, which also has this year's "Life Is Beautiful."
As it has done with independent films, Miramax has excelled in finding and marketing the foreign blockbuster, a relative term since the record North American gross for one -- in dollars not adjusted for inflation -- is $21.8 million (for "Il Postino" in 1995), about half what "The Waterboy" made in its first week.
So far, "Life Is Beautiful," the story of a man who uses humor to shield his son from the horrors of a concentration camp, has grossed $14.4 million in North America. With a little more push from pre-Oscar promotion it could overtake "Il Postino," a previous best-picture nominee, in domestic grosses.
Another subtitled film, Brazil's "Central Station," about an old woman who helps an orphaned boy, has an outside shot at a best-picture nomination, in part on the power of Fernanda Montenegro's Oscar-caliber performance. Released by Sony Pictures Classics, "Central Station" should surpass $1 million in grosses, the benchmark for success for a foreign-language film.
Among the upcoming releases, one of the more interesting is "Children of Heaven," another heart-tugging film with kids. Only this one is produced in a country whose film industry is alien to most Americans: Iran.