When "shit" means "damn"

Yes, I'm about to do this. I'm about to write a post about Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist in which the primary observation I will make has to do with a piece of controversially translated dialogue.

Welcome to The Audient.

So the scene in question is when the handler of our main character, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), comes to Paris to make sure Marcello is not losing his nerve about carrying out his mission. The handler, Manganiello by name (and yes, I was constantly thinking of the guy who strips in Magic Mike), is talking to an unseen Marcello, but a passing Parisian woman thinks he is speaking to the birds. The line she speaks to him, as translated into English for the subtitles, is "He thinks the birds speak Italian! Damn!"

Except the last word she clearly says is "merde," which everyone knows is the French word for "shit."

Do they think we're that dumb?

The answer is no, no they don't. They just think we want the meaning of what she said translated, rather than the words themselves.

In reality, the English "Damn!" is closer to what that "Merde!" is trying to express than the English "Shit!"

"Shit!" is an expression of a surprise change in fortunes, usually negative. Something bad happens, you yell "Shit!"

"Damn!", on the other hand, is an expression of amazement over the audacity of a person's behavior. Someone does something audacious -- like speak to French birds in Italian -- you say "Damn!" Or, if you are a character on an urban sitcom, it's "Daaaa-yommm!"

It reminds me of this post, on translation vs. transliteration. The goal is ultimately to convey meaning, not convey linguistic precision.

Look, I'm sure you don't really give a damn, or give a shit. What you might really want to know is: What did I think of The Conformist?

Yeah, it's pretty much a masterpiece. The only reason I didn't give it a full five stars was that I spent a good deal of the middle portion disoriented within the plot. There were certain things that were occurring live that I thought were flashbacks, and vice versa. It all made sense by the end, but the experience of being uncertain threw me enough and lasted long enough that I ultimately thought it might have been handled a little bit more gracefully. Still, this is tour de force filmmaking with especially remarkable camerawork.

While watching it, a character on an urban sitcom might even say "Daaaa-yommm!"

Bleeping airplane movies

One of only two times I've ever flown first class -- both times by lucky upgrade, I can assure you -- was travelling to my cousin's wedding in Atlanta in 1999. This was probably also the first time I privately watched a movie on my own seatback entertainment system. I still remember today that the movie was Croupier, one of Clive Owen's earliest films, and sort of a breakout for him -- though I personally didn't dig it. I remember it because I wasn't sure whether we'd get to see the full, unedited version of the movie on the plane. Once Alex Kingston, erstwhile of ER, disrobed part of the way through, I had my answer, and was thrilled by the possibilities of private airplane entertainment.

Well, that was then, this is now.

I certainly understand that particular images must be edited out of movies on planes, because there's no way to control which content is randomly witnessed by which small children wandering which aisles. What I don't understand, though, is why the dialogue must be edited on a movie that you have chosen to watch privately, through headphones only.

Yet that was predominantly the case on the five flights I took during my recent trip to the U.S., a trip whose jet lag is still affecting me a full four days after I returned.

I first noticed it during Begin Again, John Carney's better-than-expected follow-up to Once. One "No freaking way" might have been written into the script, but when it was followed up quickly by a "bullcrap," I knew that I was, indeed, involved in a very bullcrap situation. My viewing of the movie was not necessarily tainted, as I still really enjoyed it. But I wondered whether the full, unfiltered version would have satisfied me all the more. I imagined Mark Ruffalo dropping real f-bombs, rather than these little f-bellyflops, and knew that I had missed out on something.

I followed that up with The Fault in Our Stars, figuring that a movie intended for teenage girls would probably have a pre-approved, profanity-free dialogue track. Nope. This one was edited too, even with probably fewer than ten instances of naughty language overall.

Seeking to move toward greater certainty of a clean and unedited product, I selected period pieces as my next two movies on the flight: Belle and Magic in the Moonlight. These two also carried warnings about editing for content, though I did not notice anyone calling anything "bullcrap" in turn of 19th century England.

And though I liked all of these films quite a bit, dolling out three four-star ratings and considering a fourth such rating (Fault just ran on too long after hitting its sublime stride midway through), I did feel a bit cheated by Qantas Airlines for giving me a neutered and sanitized version of these movies. Aren't Australians supposed to be less prudish about language? You'd think so -- people swear on regular TV here.

I suppose the thinking is that a really savvy kid -- okay, even a halfway savvy kid -- could easily watch something verboten when his/her parent or parents are asleep. On a flight as long as the one from Australia to the U.S., there are ample opportunities to sneak in some forbidden viewing. I guess the airline thinks it's its responsibility to minimize that potential.

So, figuring I needed to head toward even more kiddie material the next day on my United flight from Los Angeles to Boston, I watched a Disney movie (Maleficent) and a Dreamworks movie (How to Train Your Dragon 2). Both appear to have been unmolested.

What really got my goat was when I was flying the fourth flight, from Denver to Los Angeles (the third, from Boston to Denver, had no video screens to speak of), and I paid good money for DirecTV in order to watch the inferior comedy Tammy. Even this was bleeped, though I suppose only a hint of Melissa McCarthy's grotesque shtick goes a long way. (Making matters more annoying, I was supposed to get $2 off per DirecTV rental if I bought at least three with the same card -- but my credit card statement did not show the discount.)

Imagine my surprise, then, when the first movie on my return trip to Australia -- Wish I Was Here -- included an f-bomb in the very first scene, as well as Zach Braff's bare ass in a masturbation scene just a few minutes later.

Huh?

So some movies are edited for language/content, but not all of them? Or did Qantas randomly loosen its standards in the two weeks between my first trip across the Pacific and my second one?

The next movie was Earth to Echo, a kids movie anyway, but then I got little bursts or profanity in both What We Do in the Shadows and These Final Hours, to finish out the trip. These Final Hours even included an orgy scene with a bunch of naked boobs, bringing us full circle to Croupier.

My ultimate conclusion is that if there was a dubbed version of the movie, they chose that one, but if there wasn't, they chose the full, unedited, R-rated version -- and didn't give it a second thought.

*shrug*

Just begging for some British accents

As I was watching Red Riding Hood this weekend -- not at the drive-in, as originally planned, but in a dumpy theater in Marina del Rey -- I became acutely aware of the need for fake British accents in films set at some point in the nebulous past.

Without them, you are even more aware of the fact that people are just parading around in costumes.

We tend to tease movies set in times of antiquity for their reliance on generic British accents, even when the action is not set anywhere near England or its colonies. As an extreme example of that, I laughed at the fake British accents in 10,000 B.C. -- not only was there no English language at the time, but there was probably no language, period. We tend to think of those people as communicating via pre-linguistic grunts. Then again, we also tend not to think of them as fighting with woolly mammoths, so that was not the film's only problem.

But the alternative is not usually what Mel Gibson did in The Passion of the Christ or Apocalypto, where the language genuinely spoken by the characters was the language used. Sometimes the alternative is to speak with an accent appropriate to whatever region of the world it is, but that can be really hokey if the actors can't pull it off. (And tends to seem racist if the action is set in Asia, for example.) The more common alternative is to just strip away all artifice and let the actors speak in their own regular voices.

Which is what Catherine Hardwicke decided to do in Red Riding Hood. Many of the actors in this movie are Americans -- notably excepting Julie Christie -- and they talk like Americans. Like modern-day Americans. This leads to a number of problems, not the least of which is that it reminds everyone that this is frivolous teen fare -- not unlike Hardwicke's own Twilight.

Surely, part of why most things in Red Riding Hood seem frivolous has to do with Hardwicke's direction. I'm not usually one to single out the directing in a film, such that I say a film was "badly directed" --- that may certainly be the case, but I tend to blame the director for the overall failure, not for "directing badly," per se. But this film was the exception, where I watched the stultifying acting and thought "This movie is badly directed."

But part of it has to do with those American accents for sure. They seem anachronistic, because they remind us that there was no country called the United States when the events of Red Riding Hood would have transpired. England, on the other hand, has been around since -- well, since 10,000 B.C., it would seem. So British accents never seem anachronistic, even in a movie about cavemen. Sure, they're ridiculous if you think about it -- but most people who watched 10,000 B.C. did not think about it, and the accents just sounded right.

American accents do not sound right in a movie like Red Riding Hood. Surely, with higher caliber actors and a better director, they'd sound more right. But they are ultimately hamstrung by how modern they sound. Which just leads a person like me, who watched the movie for some good art direction and possibly a creepy wolf-on-girl sexual encounter, to think all the more about a teen-oriented contraption like Twilight.

I don't have anything more to say on the subject, but I thought I'd leave you with a little personal anecdote from the experience of seeing Red Riding Hood. You may remember that back in January, I lost my wallet at an illegal double feature of The Green Hornet and Blue Valentine -- illegal in the sense that I paid for the first and snuck in to the second. (How could you not remember it, I keep making reference to it.) My wallet was ultimately found by the janitorial staff and turned in to their lost and found.

Well, this past Sunday I got to return the favor. As I was walking in to the bathroom to relieve myself before the movie started, I saw a wallet sitting on top of one of the urinals. You men will be familiar with the spot -- it's that area atop the flushing mechanism, where you sometimes rest things when you don't have any available pocket space, and you need your hands free to do your business. I was immediate struck by the appropriateness of finding this wallet, scooped it up, and brought it to one of the ushers.

It gives me an intense feeling of satisfaction any time I find a lost item, because I know I'll do right by it. I know that if I lost something, I'd want me to find. I love being the link in the chain that helps this person get their property back, that helps put a little spring in their step that day. Because if you've lost something important and then found it again, you know that the feeling is so good, you're happier than if you'd never lost it in the first place. Which can most certainly be a life-affirming sensation.

However, when I posted about it on Facebook, someone did make a comment that got me thinking, and I'm curious about your opinion. In this scenario, would you have turned it in to the theater staff, or tried to reach the wallet's owner directly? My commenter suggested that the person might have gotten the wallet back faster if I'd done the latter. I momentarily wondered about that, and realized that it's true -- either the theater staff could botch the return of the wallet, or the person who lost it might not realize that the theater was where they lost it. And even if there was no way for me to call the person, I'd have their address on their driver's license, and could probably find them on Facebook to send them a message.

But I ultimately decided that the course of action I took was the correct one. I thought the most likely outcome would be that the person would realize they'd lost the wallet before they even left the theater, and would know they had it coming in, because they used it to pay for their tickets. They'd go straight to the lost and found and would get it straight back. And I'd save them at least an hour or two of panicked retracing of their steps, before they'd have a chance to check Facebook for their message from me.

What would you have done?

Kristin Scott Thomas goes French

When some actresses reach a "certain age," they undergo the acting industry's version of menopause. (Which, I guess, probably coincides with real menopause). The romantic lead roles they were accustomed to are no longer offered. Now they're cast as the mother of the lead, if they're cast at all.

Other actresses, like Kristin Scott Thomas, go to France.

Scott Thomas -- who first caught our attention in Four Weddings and a Funeral, before etching her place in the Movie Romance Hall of Fame with The English Patient -- is 49. That's two years younger than I guessed she was. Not that Scott Thomas looks 51. Just that I always find these people are older than you think they are, so I guess on the high end.

I've always been a fan. Kristin Scott Thomas redefines the word "elegant."

To say she has only just now gone to France is, of course, inaccurate. She's been living there since she was 19, and she's actually been getting cast in French films almost as long as English-language ones (1987 vs. 1985).

But much of the moviegoing world has perhaps not been aware of her bilingual abilities until this past year. I myself was not aware until I heard the raves for I've Loved You So Long late last year. By the time I finally saw it, last night, I'd seen Scott Thomas show up in another French film, the thriller Tell No One, a couple months earlier.

I think the reason this interests me so much is that we are accustomed to seeing foreign actresses come to Hollywood to forge a career, but we usually don't see established English-speaking actresses go the other way. And since I'm a short-sighted American, I'm a lot more impressed by an English speaker who learns another language than a foreigner who learns English.

Again this does not particularly relate to Scott Thomas, per se -- as a 30-year resident of France, she certainly didn't need to "learn" anything for her roles in I've Loved You So Long and Tell No One. Nor did Jodie Foster, I guess, when she appeared in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement. After all, Foster is a fluent French speaker who attended a French school in Los Angeles. I guess she dubs her own lines in the French-language versions of her movies.

But can I still be impressed? Is that allowed?

What I like in particular about Scott Thomas' emigration to French films is that the roles promise to continue to be interesting for her there -- to make excellent use of her elegant fragility, her steely resolve, even into her 50s. (I see she'll be in a movie called Partir later this year, which will probably hit us sometime next year).

Because just look at what she has to do here. You'd think, since she's a French citizen and actually identifies more with France than with England, that gracefully transitioning into intelligent French films would satisfy her. Unfortunately, the lure of Hollywood is still strong -- strong enough to convince her to make twaddle like Confessions of a Shopaholic. Maybe she thought her role as a terminally stylish magazine editor would give her a prominent platform like the one Meryl Streep had in The Devil Wears Prada, but I remember just feeling sorry for Scott Thomas when I watched Shopaholic. The movie wasn't worthy of her, and it brought her down to its level.

But since then I've seen Tell No One, in which she played a whimsical middle-aged lesbian, and I've Loved You So Long, in which she plays a woman returning to the world after 15 years in prison for murder. I'd say she was brilliant in both, but her role in Tell No One was relatively inconsequential to the plot. In I've Loved You So Long, though, she's front and center, and knocks your socks off.

The vintage Kristin Scott Thomas is still with us -- even if we have to read subtitles to get her.

The right one

You know what I love about a good movie? It gives you so many different things to think about. And write about.

And so, I'm going to combine into one post the several ideas that occurred to me last night as I was revisiting Let the Right One In, the amazing Swedish vampire movie from last year. Don't worry, I'll try to keep it short.

Warning: Mild spoilers to follow.

Don't default my language for me!

One of the most dispiriting telltale signs about American movie-watching habits was the default language option that arrived with our DVD. Instead of being Swedish with English subtitles, the default option was dubbed English.

Now, it's possible that this setting was just retained from the last person who watched the DVD. I can't be 100% certain how these things work.

But if you have to have a version of Let the Right One In spoken in English, just wait until next year, when the inevitable Hollywood remake hits theaters. I was going to say "inevitably awful," but I may give this one a chance -- it's directed by Matt Reeves, whose Cloverfield was one of my favorite films of last year.

For the sake of argument, let's say this was in fact the DVD's default setting. That's kind of absurd anyway, because anyone who would seek out a Swedish vampire movie -- especially one that doesn't concentrate on being scary -- or would even be aware of its existence in the first place, would probably not want to watch it dubbed. Any serious film fan can't stand the sight of words not matching up with lips -- unless you're watching What's Up Tiger Lily?, that is. It's a sure way to take you right out of the mood of a picture, and in Let the Right One In, mood is everything.

One creepy kid I can take

The single laziest trend in horror films is the "creepy little kid with dead eyes who doesn't talk/act like a little kid should talk/act." This kid can be male, but by a consensus of Hollywood hacks, female seems to be more unsettling.

On the surface -- the very shallow surface -- it might seem like LTROI just continues this trend. The difference, of course, is that 12-year-old Lina Leandersson is actually an actor, not just a horror prop. This girl is downright scary, but by that I mean scary good. She strikes all the right chords of ferociousness tinged with melancholy, fragility bolstered by fortitude. And this story is actually about her -- not really the case in movies like The Grudge and One Missed Call, where you're supposed to be freaked out by the concept of an innocent perverted by the demonic, as part of a random cavalcade of "disturbing" images. She's this weird little stringy-haired slip of a girl, almost gothic, and it's impossible to take your eyes off her. (And I don't mean that in a weird way).

The most similar role to hers in film history is that of Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist, but I think Leandersson's performace is even better than Linda Blair's. It's subtle, layered, tragic, yet somehow strangely optimistic as well.

The thrill of not knowing

Minor spoilers ahead

Another thing great movies do is leave some of what happens up to your imagination. But it has to be the right things, not things that leave you cursing the filmmakers for their gaping holes.

Let's take the man who lives with little Eli, the blood-thirsty "12-year-old," in a suburb of Stockholm, doing her ghastly bidding for her. He's got to be in his late 50s, but that's all we know about him for sure. When he's in the hospital, Eli tells the admitting nurse that he's her father, but we're not sure if we're really meant to believe that. It seems more likely she says that to adhere to the relationship society expects them to have.

So who exactly is this man? It's open to debate. It could be her father, and I must admit I spent most of my first viewing thinking that. Upon second viewing, I now think that seems like the least likely option. More likely is that it's the grown incarnation of a boy she once seduced when he was "her age," devoted to her and either unable or unwilling to leave her, even after more than 40 years as her "assistant." Making it seem like this is the same thing that could happen to Oskar, her next-door neighbor in the apartment complex. Or, if 40 years of that life would be too intense for anyone to withstand, maybe this man is the latest in a string of pedophiles she's lured in and then used for her own purposes. You don't know. And that's the brilliance of it. You could debate it for years.

Score one for the score

I'm trying to be better about noticing music in movies, and I couldn't help but fall in love with the simple piano score composed by Johan Sodergvist. It's plaintive without being maudlin, though I should say, the guy who reviewed the movie for my site did use the word "maudlin" to describe it, so there's clearly a difference of opinion on this. (Though I should say, that was also the guy's only real complaint about the movie.)

Just say "no" to digital cats

What's interesting about LTROI is that many have suggested it's what a vampire movie made by Ingmar Bergman would look like. Sure, that's because Bergman is the most famous Swedish director of all time, and this is a Swedish film, but it's true that the style really is similar. Plus, the film is washed over with a gauzy filter that makes it look at times like it was filmed in the 1970s.

Both of which make it all the more unlikely that the film would be capable of some really interesting digital tricks, and a couple truly mind-blowing shots it would be a shame to spoil here. I'll just leave it at this: It takes you a bit by surprise how effective these shots are, especially since the rest of the movie doesn't feel "modern" -- in the worst sense of that word -- in any respect. (The action appears to take place in the 1980s as well, though that's not certain).

There's one notable exception: The digital cats. There's one scene that (I think) is supposed to be funny, where a bitten woman undergoing a transformation is attacked by a bunch of cats who see the vampire within her. First they just hiss and howl and go erect into attack mode, but then they're actually all over. It's hard to tell whether it's intentionally or uninentionally funny, but let's just say that was the only moment when I was almost taken out of the film and transplanted into Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties.

Summary

If you haven't seen Let the Right One In, I don't know why you're tying up the top of your Netflix queue with something else.

Conventions we've come to accept

Whatever you think about Mel Gibson, if you've seen Apocalypto, you have to admit that it raised the bar for authenticity of spoken dialogue. Gibson made an extremely bold decision that paid off -- he had his Mayan characters speaking in the Mayan language. And since all the film's characters are Mayan, the whole film is in that language.

It's difficult to know if the movie would have been more popular if a) it were in English, or b) Gibson had not just gone on a drunken anti-semitic rant, but $50 million seems a pretty decent haul in the U.S., considering those factors. And the movie itself? A damn thrilling action movie. Gibson did the same thing in The Passion of the Christ with a much larger box office take, but (in my opinion) a far more masochistic and unworthy effort.

For me at least, Apocalypto (and to a lesser extent Passion, which I simply tried not to think about afterward) made me reevaluate the other movies I've seen where everyone speaks in English regardless of where in the world the action is set. And watching Bryan Singer's Valkyrie last night brought those issues up again.

We've come to accept that if American filmmakers in Hollywood want to make a movie about foreign subject matter, to be consumed first and foremost by American audiences, they have to film in English, practically speaking. The most practical issue has to do with the language the director speaks. If you don't understand the language the actors are speaking, how can you even be sure they're saying the lines with the right inflection? I guess we should ask Clint Eastwood, who made the excellent decision to shoot Letters from Iwo Jima in Japanese, but relied on Japanese advisors to make sure everything was copacetic.

But Hollywood has traditionally tried to meet realism halfway, with the characters either speaking English in the appropriate regional accent, or in a generic British-influenced Euro accent that's a catch-all stand-in for "foreignness." Valkyrie deviates from that in one extremely noticeable way: Tom Cruise, the lead, uses his regular speaking voice, the one he cultivated while growing up in such diverse locations as New York, Illinois, Kentucky, Ontario and New Jersey. He doesn't try to sound either German or British. He just tries to sound like Tom Cruise.

For Valkyrie's detractors -- which were not nearly as many as we all originally thought -- this was a distraction. For me, though, it just seemed honest. Singer allowed all his actors to speak in their native voices -- it just so happens that Cruise was the only one who grew up in the U.S. Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Eddie Izzard, Tom Wilkinson ... all Brits. So their British speaking voices were not fabricated in accordance with the time-honored Hollywood tradition; that's just how they talk. It might be worth arguing that native Brits are more convincing than Americans in movies like this anyway, which is why there are no Americans other than Cruise. But hey, Bill Nighy can't carry a movie.

As I said, I liked Singer's decision. If you know you're not going to be able to make a movie about Nazi Germany in German, why manipulate us in the form of English with German (or British) accents? Just because that familiar convention makes us feel comfortable? Not only might Cruise not be able to do this effectively, but if he tried, it might detract from his performance. Instead, he can just concentrate on acting. And act he does. In fact, Cruise haters won't find a single thing about this performance to pick on. To quote my colleague who wrote the Valkyrie review: "For all the character's noble, self-sacrificing heroism, Cruise never gets hammy or indulgent; there are no ridiculously badass one-liners (those in the original trailer were cut), no Oscar-bait hysterics or vain looking-into-the-distance-with-a-single-tear-in-his-eye. You don't even get that vague, distracting sense of megalomania emanating from his usually self-satisfied grin." (I love this writer.)

But it's not as though Singer is indifferent to the fact that there's some amount of artifice involved in filming in English. And he takes care of this quite effectively. The movie opens with Cruise narrating the words he's writing in a letter, in a tent in Tunisia, where his officer has been sent as a means of hiding him away where his anti-war views can't harm anyone. Here Cruise speaks in German -- and quite well, to the untrained ear. After about a minute of Cruise's German-speak, Singer transitions the dialogue to English, first overlayed over the German, then on its own for the rest of the movie. Message: "You know they're speaking German. But because I am an English speaker and so are you, we are agreeing to do this thing in English."

Singer may have been taking his lead from the legally disgraced John McTiernan. I can think of two other good examples of this same approach in McTiernan films. Though I don't have a lot enduring memories of The Hunt for Red October, I do remember how the characters on the Russian sub start out speaking Russian, and then there's a transition to English after about the same amount of time as in Valkyrie. The example I like better is from the underrated and underseen The 13th Warrior, in which Antonio Banderas plays an Arab courtier who joins the 10th century Vikings in fighting an army of cannibalistic mist creatures. As the viewers' surrogate, Banderas' character speaks in English, a stand-in for Arabic. The Vikings speak in their own language -- they are the film's "other." The film gets everyone speaking the same language in a captivating montage in which English words steadily blend with Norse, as Banderas absorbs their fireside bragging over weeks of travel.

As in any film, ultimately, it's the filmmaking and storytelling that trumps all these language concerns. And it's probably true that if you've got a good story executed well, it doesn't matter to what extent a director honors the conventions or adjusts them to his own agenda.

I do have one complaint about Valkyrie, and oddly, it's related to the semantics of meaning. It has to do with the tagline on the poster, which was one of the reasons (along with the presence of Cruise) that I never wanted to see the movie -- until I heard it was pretty good, that is. Here's the tagline:

Many saw evil.
They dared to stop it.

Of course, what this poster means is "Many saw evil. They dared to stop it." In other words, "they" -- the characters in the movie -- should be differentiated from the "many" who saw evil. However, without the italics -- which you would never put on a poster anyway -- it sounds like "they" is modifying "many," as in "Many saw evil, and they dared to stop it," or "Many saw evil and dared to stop it."

But I'll forgive the humorous semantic ambiguity. Valkyrie is an unqualified success, and whatever errors the marketing department made don't influence that.