Adel Bencherif, Tahar Rahim in A Prophet (top); Vincent Lindon, Farit Ayverdi in Welcome (middle); Yvan Atall in Rapt (bottom)
With 13 nods, Jacques Audiard's prison drama A Prophet — one of the semi-finalists for this year's best foreign language film Oscar, leads the 2010 Cesar Award nominations.
In addition to best film and best director mentions, A Prophet is also up for best actor and male newcomer (Tahar Rahim, with two nods), best supporting actor (Niels Arestrup), best male newcomer (Adel Bencherif), best screenplay (Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri, Nicolas Peufaillit), and best editing (Juliette Welfling).
The runners-up are Xavier Giannoli's In the Beginning, the tale of a con man (best actor nominee François Cluzet) involved in the building of a road, with 11 nominations, and Phillipe Lioret's immigrant drama Welcome, with 10. In the latter film, best actor nominee Vincent Lindon plays a swimming instructor who tries to help a Kurdish immigrant (best newcomer nominee Firat Ayverdi) swim across the Channel to meet his girlfriend in England.
The French government came forward to give Welcome lots of free publicity when immigration minister Éric Besson denounced both the film, which offers a sympathetic portrayal of an illegal immigrant, and director Lioret's remarks comparing France's immigration laws — five years in prison if you give assistance to an illegal immigrant — to those of the Vichy regime. "It has overstepped the bounds," Besson was quoted as saying in L'Humanite, “to suggest that the French police are like those of Vichy, that the Afghans [sic] are hunted, and netted in raids, etc., is intolerable.” Welcome sold more than 1 million tickets in its first few weeks of release, and was the surprising best film winner at the Prix Lumiere ceremony on Jan. 15.
The other best picture nominees are Radu Mihaileanu's The Concert, the story of a down-on-his-luck former conductor (Aleksei Guskov) of the Bolshoi orchestra who attempts to have a career resurgence in Paris with the assistance of a talented violinist (Mélanie Laurent); and Jean-Paul Lilienfeld's Skirt Day, in which veteran Isabelle Adjani, following a six-year hiatus, returns to the big screen playing a teacher who gets really — but really — fed up with her rough, ethnic-minority students. For her efforts, Adjani earned a best actress nomination — following a Prix Lumiere win — and will probably take home her fifth Cesar.*
Also, 87-year-old Alain Resnais' Wild Grass, which received raves at Cannes, about the budding relationship between a man (André Dussollier) who finds a wallet and the woman (Sabine Azéma) who had lost it; and Lucas Belvaux's socially conscious psychological thriller Rapt, in which a powerful businessman (Yvan Attal) finds himself pretty powerless after he is kidnapped.
The six foreign film nominees are Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, James Cameron's Avatar, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, Gus Van Sant's Milk, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar's animated Panique au village (Belgium), and Xavier Dolan's I Killed My Mother.
The winners will be announced at Paris' Theatre du Chatelet on Feb. 27.
* For the record: Adjani's previous Cesars were for Possession (1981), One Deadly Summer (1983), Camille Claudel (1988), and Queen Margot (1994).
Photos: A Prophet (Roger Arpajou / Sony Pictures Classics); Rapt (AGAT / RTBF), Welcome (Film Movement)