Oscars race for best foreign-language film expands as Saint Laurent biopic sashays in 

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Oscars race for best foreign-language film expands as Saint Laurent biopic sashays in

French film about fashion designer faces strong competition from other foreign-language favourites, including the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night

French film Saint Laurent, with Gaspard Ulliel: from the catwalk to the Oscars red carpet? Photograph: PR

The fashion-world biopic Saint Laurent has become the 56th film to be submitted for the race for best foreign-language film Oscar, after it was selected as the official French nomination.

Directed by Bertrand Bonello, Saint Laurent stars Gaspard Ulliel as the legendary designer, and received its world premiere earlier this year at the Cannes film festival, where the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described it as “a well-made but bafflingly airless and claustrophobic film … and sentimentally indulgent to the last”. It is the second of two French biopics of the designer to be released in 2014, following the Jalil Lespert-directed Yves Saint Laurent – which itself may have expected to receive Oscar favour after securing a US distribution deal with the Weinstein Company.

Cannes 2014: Saint-Laurent is out of fashion as R-Patz crashes The Rover’s party - video

Saint Laurent faces a considerable struggle to reach the next round. The strongest entries so far appears to be Belgium’s Two Days, One Night, the Dardenne brothers’ ecstatically received redundancy fable starring Marion Cotillard, Turkey’s Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep, from auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Poland’s Ida, the unsettling family drama directed by Paweł Pawlikowski.

Other strong contenders at this stage include Xavier Dolan’s much-admired Mommy, submitted by Canada; Israel’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, a selection at Cannes and Toronto, by sister-brother film-makers Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz; and Mauritania’s Timbuktu, a Cannes hit for director Abderrahmane Sissako.

The Dardennes brothers’ Two Days, One Night and Ryan Gosling’s Lost River – Cannes 2014 video review

The deadline for submissions is 1 October, after which the Academy’s foreign language film award committee whittles down the list to nine finalists – at which point a second committee votes to produce the five-strong official nomination list. This is announced on 15 January 2015, along with the rest of the Oscar nominations, and is then voted on by all Academy members.

The foreign-language film honours will be handed out at the Oscars awards ceremony in Los Angeles on 22 February.

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Cannes 2014 review: Saint Laurent - a smirking deification

Peter Bradshaw: This second biopic of the fashion designer in as many years is cut from the same cloth as the first: swooning, self-absorbed and strangely lacking in any wider interest in society

Yves Saint Laurent: the battle for his life story

Two Days, One Night review – small-town tale with a universal punch

Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) review – Marion Cotillard gives a supremely intelligent performance

Two Days, One Night: The Dardenne brothers on making their \'Belgian western\'

London film festival: Pawel Pawlikowski wins best film for Ida

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