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English
Spoken Here
More
and more foreign-made films are being filmed in English—what
will this mean for international cinema?
By
David Brickman
When
is a film really a foreign film? The latest product to raise
that question is French director François Ozon’s Swimming
Pool, his first project in English—a pretty good example
of the current love affair with film noir stylings, although
it’s peppered with enough French to put off any subtitle-phobic
cinephiles still around.
Swimming
Pool has the distinction among this summer’s fare of featuring
a French star who speaks English (Ludevine Sagnier as a young
woman with one parent from each country) and an English star
who speaks French (Charlotte Rampling as a well-traveled British
mystery writer). But it is hardly the first film of its kind—just
part of an ongoing phenomenon in a world where Hollywood studios
are developing “independent” branches and European films are
produced by multinational coalitions.
The confusion over foreignness is felt at the level of the
Academy Awards, where, this year, two foreign-language films
were nominated for best screenplay: Y Tu Mamá También
and Talk to Her, both in Spanish. And Best Film nominee
The Pianist was shot entirely in Poland by director
Roman Polanski, who can’t set foot in the United States without
going immediately to jail. Being in English with an American
star (Adrien Brody, who took home the Best Actor statuette),
it couldn’t be a Best Foreign Language film nominee, but it
is certainly neither an American nor British film.
So, how do you decide? And does it matter anymore? When the
holocaust epic Sunshine, starring Ralph Fiennes, William
Hurt and Rachel Weisz, among other Anglophone actors, was
made in 1999 by Hungarian director Istvan Szabo with
an otherwise entirely Hungarian cast and crew, in English,
was it a foreign film? Or, when French superstar Juliette
Binoche (who is half-English) performed in English for the
first time in Chocolat, was it still a French film?
Or how about the charming German film—bet you never thought
you’d see that phrase in print—Mostly Martha,
which did not give away its language in previews and which
was called La Bella Martha (an Italian title) in the
original German version? A joint German-Italian production,
it’s part of a phenomenon of pan-European films that get made
by groups looking to raise enough support to compete with
the Hollywood studios.
Hence, Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, which was the
most expensive movie ever made in France (at $90 million)
when it came out in 1997. It starred American actor Bruce
Willis, British stars Ian Holm and Gary Oldman, and Eastern
European diva Milla Jovovich, along with many French actors
and crew. Though it was in English, it was still somehow perceived
as French, judging by the number of Césars—the French version
of the Academy Awards—it won.
But this is hardly new. Sergio Leone, the great director of
spaghetti westerns, made Clint Eastwood world-famous while
working on location in Italy—remember The Good, The Bad
and The Ugly? Interestingly, some film reference guides
catalog the Leone films by their Italian, not English titles—does
this make Clint Eastwood a foreign-film star? European directors
over the decades, such as the late Billy Wilder (born in what
was then Austria-Hungary, now Poland), have infiltrated
Hollywood to the point of being more quintessentially American
than their audiences. And crossover stars have always existed—1936
and 1937 Best Actress Oscar winner Luise Rainer was Austrian—but
are becoming increasingly common (French gamine Audrey Tautou,
of Amelie fame, is in Stephen Frears’ latest, Dirty
Pretty Things, for example).
In the end, it seems the film business is, as it always was,
driven by marketability, and the language of currency in the
world at large is English. So, if you want to make it to the
top, you gotta speak the language of the people. Though the
direction is clearly toward more “foreign” movies being made
in English and more domestic “independents” being made by
divisions of Sony et al., there will always be an upsurge
of creativity from the grassroots of every nation.
And so, for every mediocre pseudo-Euro product (e.g. Chocolat)
there will be at least one Run Lola Run. With subtitles—and
subtleties. And there will always be filmgoers eager to take
them in.
International
Flava
For
the United States, globalization isn’t just about importing
cheap toys from China and exporting cheap grain everywhere.
It’s also about transforming various forms of entertainment,
like cinema, into universally friendly products.
Back in the day, most foreign films were distributed by smaller,
independent companies. While a few are still going strong,
many are either dormant, absorbed into divisions of major
studios, or totally gone. Every studio has a boutique division
to handle foreign or homemade indie films. Columbia/Sony has
Sony Classics; M-G-M has United Artists; Disney has Miramax;
AOL Time Warner has Fine Line; 20th Century Fox has Fox Searchlight;
Vivendi Universal has Focus; and Paramount/Viacom has Paramount
Classics.
One of the odd side effects has been the phenomenon of foreign
films being shot in English with Hollywood stars. Another,
arguably, has been the softening of foreign-made films. Edgy
films of the kind made in the so-called “golden age” of the
’60s and ’70s—the radical cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, the intense
psychological drama of Ingmar Bergman, the acidic portraits
of class and family in the work of Luchino Visconti—are rare
these days. The corporate ownership of most “indie” distributors
is likely a big factor in this; it can’t be an accident that
The Piano Teacher, for example, a wrenching and disturbing
French-language film, was offered by Kino International, a
real indie.
Another side effect of cinematic globalization occurred on
the big- budget side of the business. Sometime in the mid-’90s,
Hollywood realized the economic importance of Hong Kong action
stars in the world film market. Lo and behold, Jet Li—who
couldn’t even speak English at the time—was cast as the villain
in Lethal Weapon 4. After releasing a few of his Hong
Kong films dubbed into English, Hollywood figured out that
profits on Jackie Chan products could be maximized by pairing
him with Hollywood comic actors like Chris Tucker and Owen
Wilson.
It will be interesting to see what mutant cinematic offspring
of globalization and greed will pop up next.
—Shawn
Stone
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