A Love Letter

The night that Michel Hazanavicius wrapped up the race with a DGA win, I found myself rewatching The Artist for the first time since I'd first seen it at the New York Film Festival in around October. I had never minded it sweeping the awards, and it was never quite my first choice but I always admired it and found it to be perfectly pleasant and clever.

But such may have been short selling it, I believe. Mark Harris jokes that the film has been labeled one of nostalgia falsely considering most of us were not around for the era the film chronicles, thus we can't feel nostalgic about it. But I rewatched it just feeling nostalgic for having watched it the first time a few months ago, and nearly every image was memorable in a way you just don't find with cinema these days. The Artist will be a film forever remembered as a classic precisely because of that — because you can say, "oh, remember that scene in the film?" with nearly every scene and it'll be clear and crisp in your mind as the day you'd first seen it, whether you realize it or not, the same way you can with so many gems of the most classic Hollywood films. Hazanavicius deserves full credit for expressing this story through such salient, memorable images throughout the film.

It's very much a cinematic picture in it's own right — it wouldn't even be fair to call it a period piece, since I believe the film doesn't actually take place in a real world. It takes place within the realm and universe of a silent film from that era, its characters are characters themselves from the kind of movies from that time, and more than just sheer cute gimmick, it is such a passionate homage to those films and a beautiful love letter.

It's no wonder, then, that this will almost certainly be the most deserving Best Picture winner, in my mind, since Slumdog Millionaire a few years ago. Like The Artist, Slumdog was a love letter to the Indian culture and likewise, brilliantly, infused elements far and wide from it ranging from the country's booming rise in globalized industry and development to the very conventions and sentimentality in the films of Bollywood that so many of the impoverished populations escape into with joy, dancing, sadness, redemption, morality, and more. Audiences fell for Slumdog Millionaire for the same reason they'd fall for any Bollywood film as so many now love and will come to love The Artist for the same reason classic Hollywood films came to define our culture in the past century.