European Film

Best European Films

From Alfred Hitchcock to Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman to Jean-Luc Godard, Europe has birthed many of film’s greatest innovators. And that’s just to name a few. The more you dig into the world of European film, the more and more gems you find. Scroll down to find the best European films currently reviewed on FilmRoot, or pick a country if you know what you’re after:

Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, North Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom

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The Fabulous Ones – Outfest Los Angeles 2023

The Fabulous Ones is a warm home-made story featuring real friends reuniting to relive their memories from 30 years ago. The drama comes from a fictionalized will of one of their old friends, but the personal, real stories provide the substance for this docufiction.

From the tone of the film, it feels like most of this film is a documentary. The characters all get along too closely for it to feel fictionalized. However, the director uses different film types to blur the past and present, and also reality and fiction. Sepia-tinted film makes some shots feel old – as if shot 30 years ago in the character’s past – and these are edited alongside clearer shots to indicate the present. Some scenes also alternate between these two types of film to make it unclear what is fictionalized and true to reality, such as the seance and re-enactment of their ‘dead’ friend. The blurring of reality and fiction and past and present through the type of film also fictionalizes their pre-transition lives. Home footage and photos of the characters pre-transition, look like the scenes of the seance, making their pasts feel less real than the present.

Whilst their pre-transition lives are made to feel like the fictionalized parts of this documentary, The Fabulous Ones doesn’t shy away from sharing the characters’ real experiences as Trans-women. Throughout their reunion, the camera focuses on each character to hear their queer coming of age experience and how their individual families and the society around them reacted. These scenes draws you closer to the characters by sharing their more intimate experiences, and in doing so, holds the film back from going full happy-dream with the fictionalized elements of the film. These moments ground the film in the unfortunate reality that not everyone is able to be who they are without prejudice.

If you’re looking for a quirky docufiction that lightly explores some heavy personal experiences through a fictionalized will left by a ‘dead’ friend, this film is for you.

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Delphine’s Prayers – AFI Docs Film Festival 2021

Delphine’s Prayers features a young Cameroonian woman baring her traumatic life story for the camera. In a personal one-on-one interview she recounts the death of her mother, her rape at 13, and her subsequent abandonment by her father which led her too an early life of prostitution to support herself and her daughter. She ended up marrying an old Belgian man that brought her to Europe. She came with some hope of a better life, but that has since dissipated, leaving her in poverty again.

The whole film is shot in one room in Belgium with each of the ~10 segments centering Delphine in the middle of the frame. She’s the only character on camera in this documentary until the very last scene. She’s also the only one who speaks, discounting a few prompts from the director to guide her life stories. Without any other characters, and no cuts away from Delphine, the film’s focus is completely on Delphine, leaving no room for the viewer to get distracted from her storytelling. It makes the documentary feel much more intimate – especially as Delphine is incredibly open throughout the film – but also sometimes a bit intrusive as it feels like her traumatic life story is being exploited to represent a bigger message.

The bigger message is to present Delphine’s traumatic life as one example of a generation of young African women that have been crushed by patriarchal societies at home and abroad. This message is brought together at the end of the film in a short scene in which the director talks over a visual of Delphine braiding her hair, speaking of their friendship in Europe. Because of their different backgrounds, they wouldn’t have crossed paths at home in Cameroon. However, in Europe, they’re both just seen as Black African women – reminders of Belgium’s colonial past.

Whilst it does feel a bit exploitative at times, delving into a wide range of stories from Delphine’s traumatic life, Delphine’s Prayers does give a voice to one Black African woman in Europe to represent a part of the African immigrant experience in Europe.

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Clashing Differences – Outfest Los Angeles 2023

In Clashing Differences an international women’s rights group based in Germany changes its original white-women led panel to avoid being ‘cancelled’. The updated panel however sees through their attempts to fulfill the diversity checklist in this satirical comedy.

It’s hard to get a satire right, especially when you’re satirizing topics that you can easily get wrong (such as racism), whilst keeping the tone light enough to maintain the comedy. Clashing Differences doesn’t get everything ‘right,’ but it is a pretty good attempt. The fourth-wall-breaking monologues from each character all pack a punch whilst conveying a wide range of experiences. It also always feels like the film is told from a multi-cultural perspective, by centering the non-White characters (bar-one) over white characters. That being said, the film does feel like it falls into its own trap. In trying to expose the tokenization of the multicultural characters it almost tokenizes the same characters. Each one of the characters covers a different multicultural reaction to their own tokenization.

However, the larger problem with Clashing Differences is the relationships between the characters. None of them get along through the majority of the film’s run time, clashing because of past relationships, and not just their ideas for confronting the international women’s group they’re there for. The only thing that ultimately brings them together are literal Nazis which gives viewers an out for thinking about all of the more subtle racism that the characters talk about beforehand (as Nazis always surpasses more subtle racism). It also feels like a tool to help end the film too.

Despite the convenient ending, Clashing Differences is still worth a watch. You’ll likely get some enjoyment from the satire of well-wishing white-led feminist groups and the drama fired up by conflicting views.

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Paris 13th District – AFI Fest 2021

If you’re a secret fan of love triangles but actually an art-house film snob, Paris 13th District is for you. You have your art-house credentials, with Jacques Audiard directing and Celine Sciamma writing, as well as a smooth black and white film. But you also have a light, free-flowing script with lots of sex that doesn’t slow down, making it an easy watch for anyone wanting to tune out.

Paris 13th District isn’t deep. There doesn’t appear to be any hidden subtext to either of the character’s narratives. Some of the scenes even feel a little contrived, particularly the scene in a university lecture hall in which all of the students start watching videos of a chat room girl and making fun of Nora for looking just like her. In an otherwise relatable film of 20-30 somethings, this scene stands out – making you think that the writers might actually be a bit out of touch with the young adult’s reality. But luckily the depth isn’t needed thanks to the lightness of the film. It flows so smoothly that you won’t have time to think about why it was made.

The lightness comes from a range of things. Firstly, there’s the clean simplicity of the black and white film that takes away any noise. This is supported by the simple soundtrack with synth bursts that cleanly separate the breaks between each narrative. Secondly, there’s the free characters. Even though each one has their own problems – Emilie has family drama, Nora is bullied, and Camille has his own grief – they never feel serious. Instead they appear free to do anything they like – each one quickly changes their career as if it were starting a new day. Camillie suddenly becomes a real-estate agent after dropping out of his masters, Nora starts her law degree in her 30’s before dropping out to rejoin a career in sales, and Emilie doesn’t even feel burdened to work. Their free-flowing careers comes across as a bit of a jab at millennials from the older screenwriters of the film. All of them are played as fragile characters that change their mind and lack commitment. However, it does make the film feel lighter – they all live in a city in which their troubles don’t feel that serious and in which they can change their direction in an instant.

So if you’re looking for a light relationship drama with art-house credentials, Paris 13th District is worth a watch. Whilst it’s arguably a bit out of touch, it is an easy watch for anyone looking for a break from the more challenging film festival fare.

Head to our AFI Fest 2021 Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2021.

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La Chimera (Italy) – Combining Time-Travel with Classic Cinema

La Chimera Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

Time-travel is a key ingredient of some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. It holds an unnatural power to change the future and the past, adding the driving plot behind the Back to the Future and Terminator series from the 1980s and a few modern Christopher Nolan films. Over in Italy, Alice Rohrwacher has mastered the ability to use time-travel naturally. Instead of using it as the driving force of the plot and drama, it is the icing on the cake. She has combined time-travel with wholly Italian influences; De Sica’s Neo-realism and Fellini’s Surrealism, to make her own fantastic style.

From: Italy, Europe
Watch: Trailer, JustWatch
Next: Happy as Lazzaro, First Cow, Caro Diario

La Chimera – The Breakdown

La Chimera starts with a dream. Sepia-tinted snippets of a woman in a garden evokes the feeling of warm nostalgia. The dream is interrupted by a train conductor asking for tickets, which introduces us to our dreamer: Arthur, played by Josh O’Connor. He picks out a very old looking train ticket the size of a postcard and his train-cabin-mates pick up on his unusual accent and ask where he comes from. “Far,” is his one-worded answer, coding the mystery of his character.

So who is Arthur, and has he come from another era? He doesn’t reveal anything obvious on the train. It’s not clear where he’s going or coming from, and as per his one-worded answer in the paragraph above, we don’t know who he is or where he is from either. A few puzzle pieces are inferred from the following scenes, but these do not give us a complete picture. We find out that:

He’s English
He’s been in jail – likely as the fall guy for a troubadour group of associates
He’s looking for a woman
He has a special skill at finding treasures from the past

Whilst these attributes build his character, they also all add to his mysteriousness by leading to new questions:

Why is an Englishman in rural Italy with a group of grave-robbers?
What led to his capture and was he turned in?
Who is he looking for and what happened to them?
How did he get his supernatural skill?

This mystery makes him appear like he’s been picked up from another world and time and plonked into rural Italy.

Time-travel has popped up before in Alice Rohrwacher’s films. In her previous feature, Happy as Lazzaro, the titular character falls from a great height, blacks out, and reappears in a modern era, portaling from his previous life in feudal Italy. Whilst the time-travel is more metaphorical than literal, Rohrwacher makes the jump more believable by situating Lazzaro (the lead character) in a location stuck in the past; a small rural Italian town with old, decaying houses, no modern infrastructure, and no signs of modern technology, before transporting him to the modern city. The town that Arthur finds himself in is exactly the same setting as Lazzaro’s decaying town. His house is a DIY shack on the outside of the town wall, he visits the crumbling house of his lost lover, and electronic screens and electricity itself are practically non-existent. This setting, combined with Arthur’s mystery makes viewers accustomed to Rohrwacher’s films feel like Arthur is from another era and place, and has got lost in old-town Italy whilst searching for his lost love.

Conclusion

If the time-travel and mystery haven’t already sold you on watching La Chimera, know that watching La Chimera is like watching a bubbling pot of Italian Cinema influences whilst witnessing a new talent find their stylistic voice. There’s pieces of De Sica’s neo-realism in the poverty-stricken characters and tough world they exist in, fragments of Antonioni’s mood-driven mystery in their vague backgrounds and existence, and a large chunk of Fellini’s surrealism and panache in the bombastic scenes and cinematic magic. Rohrwacher in La Chimera manages to bring together all these influences whilst building on the natural time-travel of Happy as Lazzaro, forming her own style from the embers of the Italian classics.