Margot Kidder plays French Canadian

I've continued watching the movies Quentin Tarantino discusses in Cinema Speculation, and I haven't had to jam too many of them in to keep pace with my reading. It helps when you only budget 20 minutes of reading time a day on trains. Don't judge.

Last night it was Sisters, the third previously unseen movie I've watched after The Getaway and The Outfit.

As those two were more or less carbon copies of each other, crime capers with equivalent three-star ratings on Letterboxd, it was a nice change of pace to get to the Brian De Palma psychological thriller, which I gave a half-star more than that.

I don't know what Tarantino's take on it is because I haven't gotten there yet in the book, but I know what I'm going to talk about today: the decision to make Margot Kidder's character French Canadian.

Now, Kidder herself is Canadian, but she's not French Canadian. Big difference. One speaks English with a barely detectable accent you can only perceive when they say "house." The other speaks English like a Parisian playing around with the language and its grammatical conventions for the first time.

So yes, Kidder has to sound like the latter in this movie, even though she's the former. (And she probably doesn't even say "hoose.") 

It's a curious choice.

Normally when an actor speaks English with an accent in a movie, it's for one of three reasons:

1) They are actually not a native English speaker, and this is the best they can do;

2) They are making a movie in English where the characters are from a particular part of the world, so they speak with that sort of accent to give us some sense of authenticity, when for commercial and practical reasons they can't actually film in the local language;

3) They are making a movie set in the past, and a generic British accent makes it sound more old-fashioned than their normal "just stepped off Venice Beach" accent would make them sound.

So what I'm saying is, Margot Kidder speaks with a French Canadian accent even though there is no story reason, no geographical reason, nor any practical real-world reason she has to do it. The movie, you see, is set in New York. The choice to make her French Canadian is, it would seem, completely random.

Fortunately, this is a pretty helpful scenario for our friend AI to pop its head in and lend a hand. 

This is what AI has to say about De Palma's reasons:

Brian De Palma wanted to add to the film's "joyful fakery" and create a sense of vulnerability that a foreign accent would provide. Her accent contributes to the dramatic and thrilling tone of the film, making her seem more "adorable" to other characters. 

However, I read elsewhere -- having trouble finding it right now -- that a lot of people at the time thought the accent was poor, even laughable. For her part, Kidder said she could do the accent because she had lived in Quebec.

And hey, I did think she did a pretty good job with it. Though maybe I'm just happy to discover my Lois Lane in movies where I'd never seen her.