The subtitles were not in sync with the dialogue.
That's right, they were coming about six seconds before the actual spoken words they were translating, though strangely, this gap narrowed as the movie was going until it was almost imperceptible.
The movie was Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart from 1971. And why was I watching Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart from 1971, you may ask?
It was June's assignment in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, a Facebook group of Flickchart users, in which each month we are assigned the highest ranked movie from another person's chart that we haven't yet seen. Murmur of the Heart was someone's #2, which I find a strange choice, but then his #1 is also pretty strange: The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, which I also had occasion to watch in this group maybe a year ago, and which I did like a fair bit.
You'd think this guy and I might not be very well suited for one another, but his top ten is a strange mix of movies I've never heard of and movies that are in my own top ten. Examples of the former? Twist and Shout (1984), Young Hearts (2024) and Friends (1971, and what is it with this guy and the year 1971?). Examples of the latter? Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Princess Bride, though Bride is technically just outside my top ten at #11.
In any case, the comparative obscurity of half of his top ten meant I might have had to skip all the way down to his #5, Young Hearts, as a possible viewing for June. If you can't get your hands on the movie you're actually assigned, you just go to the next one that you can find.
But when I posted in the group that I'd been unable to track down Murmur, he posted a link to a Russian streaming site where I could watch it.
That sounds extremely dodgy, but I have actually used this site once before, also in this group. It feels like this would be piracy, or at least expose me to malware, but I trust the guidance of others in this group, most of whom are younger than I am, and in any case, the last time it didn't cause me any problems, that I am aware of. (No identity theft since then, at least.)
The Russian stream of Murmur of the Heart did cause me one problem, though, and by now you know it's the subtitle delay -- or rather, the subtitle head start.
It took me a minute to figure out what was going on. At first I thought there were no subtitles at all, because there were characters speaking words that were receiving no translation. But then I had already seen subtitles, so that was obviously not it.
I suppose even if I didn't speak a decent amount of French, I would have soon figured out that the subtitles were coming early, but my knowledge of French landed me on that conclusion a lot sooner. I timed it and found it to be about a six-second delay between the two.
At this point I had to decide whether I was going to abandon the movie. I had already determined I could rent Young Hearts on Apple.
But then I decided, how much chaos could this actually cause? I might as well just keep watching.
The truth is, it did not cause very much chaos. The way a scene proceeded was still largely unaffected by this problem. You'd get a "spoiler" of sorts if there was dialogue in a new scene that hadn't come on the screen yet, but this is not the kind of movie where big things are happening where you don't want even a five-second preview. (There's a big thing that happens at the end, which I won't spoil, but by then this problem had been largely mitigated, which I will explain in a moment.)
The most challenging aspect to it, I suppose, is that you'd get dialogue without actually knowing which character was speaking it, because they hadn't actually opened their mouth yet. By the time they were actually speaking it, there might have been three or four more lines that appeared, and it was difficult to go back and determine who had said what. However, I also found that this did not really matter, and a lot of it could be sorted out in the context of what was being said. I mean, there are certain things that would only be said by a mother and certain things that would only be said by a son.
I should tell you a bit about what this movie is about. It's a coming-of-age story set in 1954, about the sexual awakening of a 15-year-old (or so) boy, who has an overprotective mother. She was the only actor I was really familiar with, as she's played by Lea Massari, an Italian beauty who was also one of the stars of L'Avventura. (She only just died last year at age 91.)
I should also tell you why the dialogue eventually caught up with the subtitles.
One of the things that struck me as dodgy about this Russian streaming site was that it would have these little "blips" in the movie. When the first one came, it had all the hallmarks of the movie stopping for a brief ad. Except no ad came. Instead, after about a second, the movie resumed.
Although I didn't realize it at first, each of these blips was slightly bridging the gap between the subtitles and the dialogue. There might have been one about every ten minutes, and maybe they were actually less than a second each, because it took until nearly the end that the dialogue and subtitles were essentially in sync, with only a mildly perceptible delay of the dialogue after the subtitles. I wondered if the movie had gone on another 30 minutes, whether the subtitles would have actually fallen behind.
After watching the movie, I still think it's a weird choice as someone's #2. I suppose a coming-of-age movie can have quite an impact on a person, depending on when they see it. But I reckon that either you have to be at that age when you see it -- which is why movies like Stand by Me and My Life as a Dog had such an impact on me -- or the movie has to be set during the time period when you were that age. (So, as an example not from the movies, maybe something like Stranger Things, when I was the same age as those characters in the mid-1980s.)
Perhaps one of those two things describes this guy, who I otherwise don't know. The rest of his top ten includes other older coming-of-age stories I've seen but which did not connect with me the way they did with him (like Au Revoir Les Enfants), though then also one from 2024 in Young Hearts. So who knows, really.
One thing I can tell you is that something very shocking, that does not involve violence, happens near the end of the movie, which I can only recall seeing in one other movie -- and which also would make a person have questions about any viewer who ranks this movie as high as this guy does. Then again, the other movie where I've seen this is my #682, meaning it's in the top ten percent of my Flickchart, so maybe I should be cautious about any untoward implications.
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