Language vs. content vs. absorption

I've been hearing about the video game Exit 8 for a while. Are you supposed to italicize video game titles?

My wife and my younger son are the gamers in the family, and they've told me about it, though my wife couldn't really play it because the game action made her nauseous. My older son is a gamer too, but he games independently, while my wife and younger son usually game together. And my older son is at an age where he wouldn't really tell me about any games, or much of anything else.

In any case, as this poster succinctly encapsulates, the game involves a commuter stuck in an endless loop in a subway station, where bizarre things occur and there is no escape. That's about as much as I knew about it, except also that it was Japanese. 

This poster is, of course, for a movie, not a video game. I don't generally write about video games, in and of themselves, on my movie blog, especially since I almost never play them.

I'd known about the movie almost as long as I'd known about the game. Sometime about a year ago my wife said "Here's this crazy game, and they are also making a movie." The movie played MIFF last August, and for a half a second my wife and I talked about trying to see it there, but we ultimately did not.

The movie, directed by Genki Kawamura, finally hit Australian theaters on Thursday, and I got the idea to watch it with my wife this weekend for a date night. (Plus I'm going to review it. Two birds.)

My wife liked that idea but came back with a different one: What if we take the kids?

On the surface, it seemed like a strange suggestion for a movie with the following genre categorizations on IMDB: Body Horror, Folk Horror, Monster Horror, Psychological Horror, Psychological Thriller, Action, Adventure, and just plain Horror. (Is that the most genre categorizations on IMDB? Probably not, but close.)

I did have some content concerns, though it was actually a ninth genre categorization that I thought might be the most salient: Japanese. (Is Japanese a genre? Discuss.)

To my knowledge, my kids have never seen a movie with subtitles. The closest they've come is small portions of movies that require subtitles. Like let's say there's some alien species in a Marvel movie that's speaking its own language. That might contain about a minute's worth of subtitles on screen. 

A whole movie? That seemed like a bridge too far, even if the younger one and definitely the older one would have no problem with the content. 

Even still we decided to put it to them, or really, to put it to the younger one, because we needn't create expectations of possibly seeing a movie in the older one if the younger one's response was going to put the kibosh on the whole idea.

Which it did. I wasn't present for it, but when my wife asked him, apparently he hemmed and hawed for a moment and decided that seemed like a lot of work for a whole movie. Fair enough.

In truth, I think everyone approaches their first foreign language movie with a little trepidation. They think reading subtitles is going to be a chore. They can't properly envision how quickly you can incorporate the reading of the subtitles into your unconscious process of watching the movie, with the result being that you miss nothing either visually or in terms of language. For sure you can't be on your phone, and it helps not to be eating something that requires your attention. But the actual viewing experience is only minimally impacted by the reading, which you and I know but which a first-time viewer might not.

Then again, for some people, this trepidation never goes away. I know a lot of adults who don't want to watch foreign language films because they think it feels too much like work. 

So instead of going to the 2:10 showing of Exit 8, we went to the 8 p.m. showing -- the date night I originally envisioned, which was preceded by a yummy Thai dinner across the street from the cinema in Yarraville.

It turns out that neither the content nor the language would have been worries for our kids in Exit 8. There are a few "scary" images, but none of them involve gore. A few moments of people looking creepy and speaking in voices that are not their own, and even a cameo appearance from that mouse that had a human ear grafted to its body. But nothing they couldn't have handled.

The dialogue is fairly minimal, and fairly repetitive in nature. And some of the words are even the same. Did you know that the Japanese word for "door" is "door"? (Or something very close to that.)

But what probably would have gotten them was the boredom.

Look I'm not going to say Exit 8 isn't good. I liked it. I gave it 3.5 stars out of 5. 

But the game itself is based on repetition, and even with small changes throughout, it started to try my patience after a while. I started being really critical of whether they were doing enough with the concept and providing interesting enough variations on the core narrative template. And I have to say the dark and stormy, a rum-based drink I had with dinner, was exacerbating the sleepiness I was already feeling from a busy day.

My younger son, a veteran of the game, might have given it his approval, though I suspect it might have been grudging. My older son, who had really disliked the last horror we saw with him in the theater (Steven Soderbergh's Presence, discussed here), might have been less forgiving.

So we made the right call, but not for the reasons we would have thought.

And got a great date night out of it to boot. 

A "Christmas" movie you wouldn't watch at Christmas, and the question of default subtitles

I have had an itch to watch Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence for a long time. 

Long recently, and long within the full span of my lifetime.

Recently, it's been part of my Kanopy queue, probably for something like three or four years now. 

Within the full span of my lifetime, it was one of the movies my mother recorded off The Movie Channel (and may never have watched). Seeing it in the plastic bins with all the other VHS tapes of movies she'd recorded and never watched led to speculation on my part about what it was about. 

Actually I did know something of what it was about, because there was an image of it I'd caught somewhere -- probably in an ad on The Movie Channel -- that haunted me. For those of you who've seen that movie, you'd know the image was David Bowie buried in sand, so only his head poked above the surface.

I probably would have gotten to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence before now except that I am such a slave to thematically appropriate viewings that I think I thought I had to watch it at Christmastime. Even knowing it was set a prison camp run by the Japanese in World War II, I thought with that title, I had to save it for December.

But see the thing is, in December, I've got no time for random 41-year-old movies starring David Bowie. I need to watch movies from the current release year in order to prepare my year-end list, I need to watch genuine Christmas movies, and usually I need to watch old favorites that taste just a little bit better during the holiday season. Old movies that are new to me get the short shrift pretty much from after Halloween until late January. 

So a Tuesday night in May ended up being the right time to watch Nagisa Oshima's film.

I liked it about as well as I like any movie set in a camp holding prisoners of war, which is to say, just fine. Actually, that's a bit of short shrift for these movies themselves. As soon as I started to test the validity of my middling response to POW movies, I started to think of exceptions, such as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Stalag 17 and a movie I only just watched for the first time about a month ago, The Human Condition: No Greater Love. Which, incidentally, is also made by a Japanese director.

What I can say for sure, though, is that I am not inclined to go on at length about the details of the movie. It was good, it had good performances, enough said.

Of course, if that were all I had to say about it, I'd only be addressing half of my chosen title for this post.

Nary a few moments into Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, I noticed there were Japanese characters, not to mention one English character, who were speaking in Japanese, without the Japanese being translated.

And I immediately felt I could not be certain what were the true intentions of the filmmaker.

In most English language movies, we are accustomed to expecting dialogue spoken in foreign languages to be subtitled. This happens without us having to do anything as viewers. For a very small percentage of English language movies, the film will choose not to provide a translation -- often for the purpose of disorienting their English-speaking audiences, just as the English-speaking characters are disoriented.

If you see a movie in the theater, and you are in a country where English is the official language, you know exactly what the filmmaker's intentions are. Since there is no ability for any individual audience member to customize their viewing experience, we are handed the subtitling option appropriate for the largest number of viewers. And if we get no subtitles, it means the director sure as heck intended it to be that way.

At home, though, we are in a thoroughly customizable environment. We can have subtitles on. We can have descriptive text for the hearing impaired. Sometimes we might even be able to dub it into another language.

But what should we do? What did the director want us to do?

I did turn on the subtitles in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, not only because I suspected they were supposed to be on, but because even some of the words spoken in English, with their heavy British or Japanese accents, benefitted from having on-screen text as a reference point. 

But when the subtitles don't exist as the default option -- like, embedded into the print rather than layered on top -- you don't really know what you're supposed to do. Maybe you're not supposed to understand what the Japanese characters are saying, or what the one Brit who can speak Japanese is saying when he's speaking to them. Maybe this is all meant to approximate the experience of being a prison of war in a foreign land. (The film is actually set in Java, Indonesia, but there are no Indonesian characters.)

Because these subtitles were offset from the screen by big black rectangular boxes behind them, it gave me even more of a sense that what I was seeing was alien to the original print. Maybe whoever distributed this version of the print translated because they could, not because they should.

Often I am allergic to googling the answer to one of the rhetorical questions I ask here, but in this case I did look it up. Apparently, there are two versions of the film, one with subtitles and one without. You are "supposed" to watch the one without. (So, we got the version without, but the subtitles existed as an a la carte option.)

The guy on Reddit who posted about it made what I thought was a good point about what we were "supposed" to do in this case, saying "While it sounds intriguing, I wouldn't want to miss out on half the movie if it isn't true."

I agree with this. We are only going to see most movies once in this life -- actually, most movies we are going to zero times, but you know what I'm saying. If you are only going to watch something once, you better watch the version that gives you the best chance of comprehending it. 

I'd say you could then go back and watch the version without subtitles if you really love it, but you can't un-learn the dialogue that was being said. 

Maybe I'll rewatch Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence again 20 years from now, having forgotten what was being said from scene to scene -- maybe even the entire gist of the plot -- and see what I think of it.

And maybe I can schedule that particular viewing for Christmastime. 

Days of translating poorly

Remember that great meme, one of the original memes, All Your Base Are Belong to Us? It was the humorously poor English translation of video game dialogue written originally in another language, and if you've never seen it, well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvTxv46ano

I was getting AYBABTU flashbacks while watching Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild last night.

When the film was released in 1990 in Hong Kong (and elsewhere around the world the next year), it was not yet the work of an internationally celebrated director. Wong had made only one previous film, 1988's As Tears Go By, and Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love and The Grandmaster all still lay on the horizon.

So it should be no surprise that the subtitles seem like they were written by someone who was trying to do a racist impression of a Chinese person.

Of course, it's much more innocent than that. Likely the person who did these subtitles was trying their best, perhaps literally translating when he or she should have translated colloquially. But few of the subtitles are actually grammatically correct in English, and in many other instances where they are grammatically correct, they're just not phrased the way a western person would phrase them.

That's not the only example of shoddy subtitle work, though. The length of time the subtitles stay on the screen is often highly problematic as well, as sentences containing six to ten words sometimes stay up for less than two seconds. This is necessary when the dialogue is coming out in a rapid stream, but the words were disappearing even in situations where a thoughtful pause came before the next spoken words.

Examples are probably beside the point, but after a while, I couldn't stop jotting them down. Here are some:

"You want a revenge."

"Please don't dessert me."

"May I have a look of your house."

"He gets my phone number."

"Don't stand on my way."

"It's bored to stay in one place for a long time."

"I owe you this meal. I'll be the banker next time."

I think that last one is my favorite. It's the most Base Belongingest.

Listing any more examples would start to blur the line between someone criticizing a racist impression of a Chinese person, and actually making such an impression, if it has not already. But you get the picture.

If Days of Being Wild were just some one-off from a director who never made anything again, I might expect the subtitles to be in any form, just as likely to be worthy of wisecracks from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew as to read coherently. But Wong is a major director, and the reason I chose this movie on a night I was sick with an earache is because I'd heard it discussed in glowing terms. (And because it was only 90 minutes, though in retrospect I would have chosen something that qualified as comfort food, and was in English.)

The answer, of course -- though I had to post in my Flickcharters group on Facebook in order to find it -- is that this is one of several versions of Days of Being Wild in existence. It doesn't yet have a Criterion release, despite several convincing fan mock-ups of Criterion posters, but commenters on my post said they'd seen translations of the Chinese that were unremarkable at worst. The streaming service on which I watched the movie, Stan, just doesn't have access to these other versions, or perhaps doesn't realize that it plucked an inferior version from its available resources. (It would probably be useful if I understood a bit better the logistics involved in streaming licensing, but I won't pretend to.)

The interesting thing is that this version of Days actually does do something quite well in its translation, something I wish other films did more. It translates the money. When money is spoken of in the movie, it's not listed in Yuan, but rather, in USD, so you know the total that's actually at stake. Sure, that's good for me as an American, but the U.S. dollar is the most internationally known currency as well, so if you're going to select just one currency, might as well be the dollar. It even mentions it in a rather shrewd way, as "USD" appears in the subtitles after the first mention of money, then doesn't for a while, then does again, just to remind us in case we've forgotten, kind of like the chyron appearing under the picture of a documentary subject at some point later in the movie, just so we don't forget who we've been interviewing.

I suppose it's a reality that at least two sets of English subtitles might exist for any given movie, to say nothing of the sets of subtitles for the world's other 20 most prominent languages. But I kind of feel like once a set of subtitles that's considered the definitive version comes into existence, it should suppress all other available subtitles -- something that's a lot easier said than done, of course. I mean, if someone were really concerned about it, they could remove this inferior copy of Days of Being Wild from the rotation, though perhaps that was the reason Stan was able to license it in the first place, because it costs less than the version where the translator actually understood how people speak English.

And I suppose there's also value to viewing something as an artifact of its time. If I got only the corrected version of this movie, I might not have the appreciation of how English-speaking audiences originally experienced it. Apparently, they were not as thrown by it as I was, as they surely helped elevate the movie to its place of respect in the Wong canon. Or, they were more accustomed to films being translated poorly than I am, as I cannot think of another instance of watching a movie that had worse than very minor spelling and grammatical errors.

The problem is that I have difficulty knowing how much I really like this movie because of the circumstances of my viewing. Evidently it did become a distraction for me, else I wouldn't have written this whole post.

I do think that it was a bit of a poor bet for me in the first place, as I'm not a fan of the third movie in the informal thematic trilogy that began with this movie, 2046, and I highly respect but still don't probably love In the Mood for Love, the trilogy's middle film. I don't tend to love films where men and women torment each other while lying around in tank tops around smoke-filled flophouses, which is a not totally inaccurate description of much of the first half of this film, and is why for a long time I bristled at the early films of Jim Jarmusch. So Days of Being Wild may never have been totally my thing, but the subtitles certainly didn't help.

Of course, any time you watch a film while suffering from a painful earache, you should not expect it to become your favorite.

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!"

Trapped in a room with Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski used to paint on big canvases.

A sprawling noir that penetrates every seedy corner of Los Angeles (Chinatown). A kidnapping thriller that meanders through modern-day Paris (Frantic). A holocaust drama about a preternaturally talented musician (The Pianist). An adaptation of one of the most beloved pieces of British literature (Oliver Twist). Actually, make that two (Tess).

Even when his settings were confined to comparatively small spaces, they dealt with heady, big-canvas issues (witchcraft/devil possession in Rosemary's Baby).

Lately, though, the walls have been closing in on the now-octogenarian.

The French language Venus in Fur marks Polanski's second straight film where his characters are like birds stuck in houses, flapping desperately at skylights, trying to get out of their prisons.

The first of these films, 2011's Carnage, is claustrophobia incarnate. With the exception of a brief scene at the beginning and a brief scene at the end (if memory serves), the entire story takes place inside one New York apartment, between two warring sets of parents. The movie runs a mere 80 minutes, but I felt every one of those minutes passing by.

Then Venus in Fur takes place entirely inside a theater between just two characters, as an audition by an actress morphs into an increasingly bizarre and in-depth reading of the play with the writer-director. This one runs 96 far-more-tolerable minutes.

I like Venus in Fur a lot better -- in fact, I like it a lot. But after finishing, I couldn't fail to notice that I had shifted viewing spots six times in those 96 minutes.

I started out sitting at the kitchen table. Then I moved out to the couch. Then, when I was getting too sleepy on the couch, I moved into the backyard for a little cool air. I repeated these same three hops before finally finishing the movie where I started: at the kitchen table. My laptop charged up a little of its battery on each pit stop through the kitchen table.

Feels a bit like I was that bird flapping at that skylight.

Like I said, though, at least all this claustrophobia is in service of a far worthier cause in Venus in Fur. Carnage I thought was just stagy and tedious. It did not seem like a remotely useful match between director and subject matter, and I wanted to punch all four of the actors by the time it was over -- actors I have liked, nay, loved in other contexts.

It was seeing one of Carnage's greatest flaws in Venus in Fur that brought the comparison to mind, though. One of the most annoying, overused devices in Carnage was characters almost leaving, but not actually doing so. It's the apartment belonging to one couple (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly), so the other couple (Kate Winslet and Christophe Waltz) is always on the verge of beating feet. Except in the audience we know that they are never actually going to leave, because we've heard enough about the movie's format to know it all takes place in this one setting. So each time someone makes a move for the door but then calls an audible, it's incredibly frustrating because you can see right through the ruse.

Unfortunately, Polanski went back to this well in Venus in Fur, but not as outrageously. Not so that I felt a vein in my forehead start to pulse every time a character gestured toward an exit, anyway. But the math is a bit striking: There are no less than four separate occasions when the actress -- played by Polanski's wife, Emmanuelle Seigner -- fakes an exit and has to be coaxed back by the director (Mathieu Amalric). "Methinks she doth exit too much."

There's a funny literal meaning to the title of this post, as Amalric has basically been asked to do an impersonation of his director. Since I'm not familiar with the day-to-day Polanski, I can only be sure of Amalric's physical similarity, a surely intentional one. Amalric has the same hairstyle that Polanski wore in his younger years, and he looks enough like him in other ways that I almost have to wonder if this was one of the primary reasons he was cast. (Other than Amalric being one of France's most prized acting talents.) The fact that this is clearly a portrait of himself -- there's a running discussion of how much an artist appears in his own characters -- makes Polanski's project all the more interesting. Especially as it gets into the character's psychosexual proclivities.

What I wonder is why Polanski has chosen to shrink his scale lately. Sure, he has dabbled in claustrophobia before (Repulsion is a prime example), but before now he had plenty of open spaces in his films. I'd say that he's winding down now that he's in his 80s, but that hasn't stopped the likes of Clint Eastwood (84), Woody Allen (79) and Ridley Scott (77). (Yes, I get that only one of those guys is actually in his 80s. Leave me alone.)

At least the theater is used more dynamically than the apartment in Carnage. Not like the theater is used in Birdman, of course, but enough that it could generously be considered a character of its own. Even though that is a pretty hackneyed thing to say about a setting.

The real difference from Carnage is that Polanski seems to have something to say, and interesting actors giving dedicated performances with which to say it. This is an acting clinic by Seigner and Amalric, who explore the provocative themes from David Ives' play: gender roles and power dynamics, sado-masochism, the relationship between an artist and his/her subject matter, and so forth. It kept my attention, even if it didn't keep me in one seat.

One thing did bother me, though, so I'll just awkwardly squeeze it in at the end of the post, even if it doesn't really relate to the rest of what I'm talking about. Venus in Fur relies heavily on the two actors slipping in and out of "performing" -- they perform both real and improvised lines from the play, in character, and they also carry on a dialogue as actor and director. They can alternate between these two layers of reality with only imperceptible changes, and sometimes, we're meant not to know which lines of dialogue are spoken by the actor and the director, and which spoken by the characters they're playing.

Except we do know, thanks to a decision made in the subtitling phase. It was decided that the subtitles could be used to help differentiate between Seigner the actor and Seigner the character, and Amalric the director and Amalric the character. When the "real" version of each actor is speaking, the text appears in standard font. When they are playing the character in the play, though, the font switches to italics.

While this is superficially useful, it also spoon-feeds us something that a French audience wouldn't have. A French audience is left to detect whether it's the actor or the character speaking based on changes in inflection, tone and vocabulary. My argument, though, is that this is something you can figure out even if you don't speak the language. And I'd have preferred to figure it out myself, because these characters are supposed to be blending and blurring and crossing lines between reality and fantasy. There are moments we aren't supposed to know which is real and which is a performance, and that's kind of the point. Once I began fixating on the changes to the subtitle font, though, it left no doubt about how the director -- or somebody, anyway -- thought we were supposed to interpret the action currently on screen. I like being able to decide myself what any given moment means, and what degree of blurring these characters currently find themselves in.

Still, that's a tangential artistic decision and does not really have to do with the actual text of the film. Good job, Roman Polanski. You may still have some useful films in you after all.

Warning: words

Australians have instituted a simple little innovation that it would seem very easy for Americans to adopt -- Americans, who may actually need it more.

It's a product warning on foreign language films:

THIS MOVIE HAS SUBTITLES

I wish we didn't live in a world where viewers shy away from movies just because they were filmed in other countries, but alas, we do. Considering the reality that some people don't consider it a good form of decompression to have to read their movies, it seems a sticker like the one you see on the DVD case of Therese Desqueyroux is a good solution to the problem.

Of course, I'd argue that it shouldn't be necessary for a different reason: You should be able to tell whether a movie has subtitles or not just by looking at it.

If you don't recognize "Desqueyroux" as a French name, shouldn't you at least detect that it's foreign? And if you aren't getting any help from the last name, how about the accents on the E's in "Therese"? You know, those funny accents that they never use in English?

Furthermore, if you can't turn over a movie and review some simple information (a plot description, the Englishness or lack thereof in the names of the people who made the movie), then you don't deserve to be protected from yourself in the first place.

Again, though, a sticker about subtitles isn't designed for someone who has good skills of deduction. It's designed to give a customer, any customer, the information he or she needs not to be indirectly disappointed in the video store that rented them that movie where you have to read words.

And therefore, I reluctantly admit that it makes plenty of sense.

Your thoughts?

Subtitle shenanigans

We had decided to watch a Korean horror/thriller last night, and our choice (available on streaming) was going to be Arang. I didn't know anything about Arang except that it was in our queue, which means either my wife or I must have thought it had potential. (Her, I think.)

We bailed after one minute.

No, Arang was not the worst movie you've ever seen, a movie that would turn you against it in only 60 seconds.

But its subtitles were fucked up, which is a deal-breaker.

Okay, "fucked up" goes too far. They were just too close to the bottom of the screen. You could read the words, but about the bottom third of the bottom row was below the bottom edge of the screen, so you had to read twice to make sure you got the words right. And the natural pace of dialogue just doesn't allow that kind of luxury.

Deal-breaker, right?

It got me thinking about how easy it should be to get subtitles right. There are plenty of available strategies for ensuring that the viewer can actually read the subtitles. Yet these strategies are not always satisfactorily employed.

One of the biggest bummers I have about subtitles is something you usually can't figure out from the beginning of the film. All too often, films won't do enough to distinguish the subtitles from backgrounds of the same color. Ever been watching a movie with white subtitles, and suddenly you're missing half the dialogue during a shot of bright daylight? Or sometimes you miss only a little bit, because part of the text bleeds into the background but part of it doesn't?

This should be pretty easy to fix. Two immediate solutions come to mind: 1) Surround white letters with a thin black border. A bordered letter will stand out against anything. 2) Surround the entire line of text with a banner. Nothing obtrusive.

I should be careful, though, making suggestions that would be obtrusive -- you see, lots of people reading this are in a position to put my suggestions into practice -- because the movie we watched instead of Arang committed the sin of obtrusion.

We shifted one title over in our streaming queue and watched The Red Shoes, also from Korea -- and absolutely brilliant, as it turned out. But some of the compositional beauty of the film was tainted during the opening credits.

See, the modest Korean characters, which blended so seamlessly into the mis en scene, were translated into ugly yellow lettering in English. Large ugly yellow writing. And because they couldn't cover up the Korean letters (a decision I agree with), the subtitles had to jump to the top of the screen, where they are directly impacting the composition of the shot.

My suggestion to fix this one is a suggestion the filmmakers' would be a lot less likely to go for: Just don't translate the credits. Sure, there are some things you have to translate -- say, the title -- but is it essential that we get the Roman alphabet translation of the boom operator's name? (I know, I know, you'll never get the boom operator's name in the opening credits of a film, unless it's Gaspar Noe's Into the Void, all of whose credits appear right up front. I was just making a joke. Jeez.)

Then again, I don't want to align myself with the people who leave the theater as soon as the credits roll -- credits are important.

As important as seeing the shot as it was originally intended, though? Nah.

Translating money

Do you think we should be translating money in foreign films?

I was watching the 2005 film 13 Tzameti on Friday night. I have trouble deciding whether to consider it a French film or a Georgian film -- the primary language spoken in the film is French, because the action takes place in France, but both the director (Gela Babluani) and the protagonist are Georgian, some Georgian is spoken, and "tzameti" means "thirteen" in Georgian. Which led to a bit more confusion -- I can't decide if the film is really supposed to be called either 13 or Tzameti, and in fact, some places it is listed as 13 (Tzameti). But on wikipedia and several other places it's called 13 Tzameti, so I've decided to go with that. I do know that the Hollywood remake, due out this year, is called simply 13.

Anyway, the movie is about an underground game of multi-person Russian roulette. In this particular instance of the game, there are 13 participants. Men are lured to a secret location -- it's hard to tell what percentage of them know what they're getting into -- and play several rounds of Russian roulette, all pointing their guns at each other in a circle. Some are obviously killed in each round, but some survive because the man who was pointing his gun at them either had an empty chamber, or was killed before he had the chance to pull the trigger. I won't say how many are ultimately killed, but the idea is that one man is declared the winner, and he walks away with a huge sum of money. The rest of the money is shared by gamblers who watch the proceedings, who bet on which ones will survive.

The large sum of money is what I want to talk about today. I don't recall the total size of the pot actually being mentioned in the movie, but I was watching the movie mostly after midnight (and it was in French), so it's possible I missed it. I did see it listed as 850,000 Euros on wikipedia. But there are smaller amounts of money mentioned throughout the movie, and each time someone mentioned one of these amounts -- which I wasn't totally sure were Euros at first, either because I'm stupid or because it was late at night -- I thought, "Is that a lot?"

And that made me ponder the function of subtitles, as I have at different points in the past. Subtitles are not meant merely as a literal translation of the words being spoken, because sometimes that would leave the viewer confused by turns of phrase that have a meaning only to native speakers of that language. What's intended by the phrase is what's really important.

So if you want to extend that, you could say that subtitles are intended to provide foreign viewers with the same perspective a local viewer would have. Therefore, just translating a sum of money as however much money it is in that part of the world is not really doing the whole job, is it?

Euros are not necessarily a great example. As one of the most prominent currencies in the entire world (outside of the U.S. dollar, I would argue), the Euro has a value that most viewers in any country should be able to approximate. And I'm okay with the filmmakers giving us some benefit of the doubt, crediting us with having a certain level of intelligence.

But let's take a more extreme example. Let's say the movie is set in Ethiopia, and it's about an Ethiopian goat farmer. The currency in Ethiopia is called the Birr. What if there were a crucial scene in the movie where the goat farmer fought with a prospective customer over the price in Birr of one of his goats? Wouldn't we benefit from having this conflict translated to us in English dollars? Maybe there could be brackets after the words 15 Birr (I have no idea what a reasonable number of Birr would be to spend on a goat) that said something like [$150]. It might get clunky, but it might help us understand better whether it was the goat farmer or his customer who was being unreasonable. And that might actually be really important for us to know.

I don't know, these are the things I think about.

Translation vs. transliteration

I was re-watching Julian Schnabel's absolutely wonderful The Diving Bell and the Butterfly the other day, and it reminded me once again of the true function of subtitles.

They aren't to give us the exact translation of the words, as some choppy (and hilarious) Engrish subtitles from Japanese movies would have it. Rather, they're there to tell us what the characters meant. And more than anything, not to trip over themselves in adherence to the literal.

Even if you've never taken a single French class, you'll probably realize there's something wrong with the subtitles in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But we'll get to that in a minute.

The true story concerns Jean-Dominique Bauby, a former editor of the magazine Elle. After suffering a stroke, Bauby (or Jean-Do, as his friends call him) develops an extremely rare disorder called "locked-in syndrome." The syndrome paralyzes everything in Jean-Do's body except his eyes, leaving blinking as his only method of communication. As if that weren't bad enough, the doctors must sew up his right eye in order to prevent it from becoming septic. A fully functioning brain, and only a single eye as its outlet of expression.

In order to maximize the potential of that fully functioning brain, a speech therapist develops a system to help Jean-Do "speak," as it were. She reorganizes the letters in the alphabet according to their frequency of use in the French language, and then reads the letters off to him. When she reaches the first letter of the first word Jean-Do wants to say, he will blink. Then she'll start over again with the second letter of the first word, until it's obvious what word it is. Then on to the next word. And so on.

Well, Schnabel et al encountered a slight problem with this on the translation side. Namely, do you maintain absolute fidelity to the dialogue, and translate the letters that are actually being spoken, or do you fudge the translation in order to spell out the English word in the subtitles?

They opted for the latter. I think it's the right decision, but it still leaves the viewer in the unusual position of watching Jean-Do blink over the letter M, and have the letter D appear in the subtitles. Then on to the letter O, and have the letter E appear. Then on to R, and have an A appear. Jean-Do is spelling the word "mort." But we're seeing the English word "death."

Did they have an alternative? Well, not a good one. The only other thing to do would be to spell "mort" as it's being spoken, then maybe include the English translation in parentheses. It'd look something like "mort (death)." But that would tend to blunt the impact, wouldn't it?

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly also called to mind a second issue I have with subtitles as they are used generally. And on this one, I'm not sure I agree with the approach.

Namely: How come songs sung in foreign languages seem to also rhyme in the English translation?

Jean-Do's children sing him a song to lift his spirits, and I noticed that the words were sounding right in French, and looking right in English. But most words that sound the same as other words in French aren't the same words that sound the same as the same other words in English. The probabilities are just not favorable. (I tried to find the nursery rhyme sung by Jean-Do's children on the internet, to truly test my theory, but I had no luck).

Yet there's some perception by the subtitlers that we English audiences would consider that song less pretty, less song-like, if its words did not appear to have a rhyming English translation. Even though logic tells us that it would be impossible to rhyme in two languages at once and still keep your meaning, thereby forgiving the failure to rhyme in the translation.

Well, the conclusion seems obvious: Instead of the actual words of the song being sung, words that mean a similar enough thing are what we're seeing in the subtitles. At least, let's hope the words have a similar meaning. If the meaning is not very similar, aren't you subtly changing what's being communicated by that song? Sure, a lot of the time, the exact meaning of a nursery rhyme is unimportant. But sometimes, it sure the hell is.

I don't know, I like to think I'm mature enough as a viewer to get that the song rhymes in some language, even if it's not the one I speak.

I hardly think The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the only film guilty of this, which is why I'm just meaning to discuss a phenomenon in general rather than point an angry finger at this terrific film.

And it is terrific -- no matter what your native language. In fact, it's such a unique story, so uniquely told, that even people who hate reading when they're watching movies will love how it communicates the act of communication.