Yahoo Lifestyle Why Brady Corbet, Sean Baker and Coralie Fargeat Were the Only Directors Who Could Make Their Best Picture Nominees
Directing is an all-encompassing job, requiring a painter’s eye, a psychologist’s understanding of people, a juggler’s coordination and a general’s big-picture focus.
As many responsibilities were undoubtedly shared behind the scenes by the five filmmakers honored with Oscar nominations this year for directing — Jacques Audiard (“Emilia Pérez”), Sean Baker (“Anora”), Brady Corbet (“The Brutalist”), Coralie Fargeat (“The Substance”) and James Mangold (“A Complete Unknown”) — each brings something unique that sets them apart from their competitors.
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For Baker, it’s controlled chaos. The impact of “Anora” relies upon the efficacy, and appeal, of a frantic, discombobulating narrative in which the film’s namesake sex worker (played by Mikey Madison) finds herself an unwitting tour guide through New York’s Brighton Beach neighborhood to locate Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the overprivileged son of a Russian oligarch with whom she eloped. In another filmmaker’s hands she might simply seem vulnerable, even victimized in the clutches of Vanya’s “handler” Toros (Karren Karagulian) and his feckless henchmen. But Baker’s balletic staging of these seemingly unpredictable scenes evidences Ani’s determination — and deeper strength — to maintain an active role in the search for her newly-minted husband.
If “The Substance” culminates in a similar kind of pandemonium, Fargeat builds methodically towards it with a striking combination of style and visual storytelling. The signposts of TV fitness guru Elisabeth Sparkle’s (Demi Moore) disturbingly surreal world appear early via super-wide-angle shots of her producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid), which emphasize him and isolate her. But as the process of swapping bodies with her alter ego Sue (Margaret Qualley) becomes all-consuming, the vivid colors and deep-focus environments become less a primary color-splashed tableau than a prison locking Elisabeth away from the attention, and adulation, that she seeks.
Corbet builds an equally distinctive but decidedly bigger world in “The Brutalist” — an enormous landscape that encompasses the horrors of the Holocaust, the rhythms of post-WWII America (especially for immigrants) and the sweeping scope of an architect’s imagination. To accurately capture his main character’s evolving perspective, Corbet transitions from impressionistic snapshots of László Tóth’s (Adrien Brody) escape from Hungary to more straightfoward documentation of his hardscrabble life as a day laborer, finally to an appropriately operatic backdrop for his creativity as it consumes everything in his path, from loved ones to the literal horizon.
Though “A Complete Unknown” also aspires to chronicle an artist’s uninhibited ambition, Mangold comparatively maintains an understated, workmanlike precision behind the camera. That isn’t to say there aren’t grand flourishes or sequences that require tremendous logistical complexity. One wonders who else among this group could orchestrate the elaborate final concert sequence and lay out its spatial geography and narrative momentum with such uncomplicated clarity. But Mangold’s capacity for making sophistication seem effortless has long been a hallmark of his work, and this film marks the perfect marriage between style and a subject.
And then there’s Audiard, whose “Emilia Pérez” exudes the confidence and control of a circus ringleader. Though fundamentally this adaptation of his operetta is a musical, he laminates its structure with the cheeky melodrama of a telenovela, a probing social consciousness and not one but three loving, knotty character studies. Playing with all of cinema’s tools and using all of the colors of his palette, Audiard creates a magic born from technical mastery. The resulting film is one whose sum is greater than its parts, because only he, like his fellow Oscar-nominated colleagues, could have put them together in precisely that way.
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