Once upon a time we lived in fear of the subtitled movie. In art-house
fleapits across the country the lights went down, the screen flickered to
life, and there, across the bottom of the frame, sat an ugly black strip
with brutal white letters on it, usually spelling out the words and thoughts
of a nasal-voiced French narrator contemplating the universe, social decay
and the fundamental impossibility of monogamy.
Jean Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle , Robert Bresson’s L’Argent
and François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim : God, they were
boring. And yet, still, the tyrannical power of the subtitle produced some
sort of Pavlovian response in us. The films felt literary (we were “reading”
them, after all), they felt worthy and they felt — gasp! — philosophical.
But, oh, we were bored.
Flash forward a few decades and everything’s changed. The subtitled film is no
longer rooted in notions of esoteric creative worth, tortured
self-expression or the possibility of enduring duff movies for a paltry
provocative glimpse of Euro-flesh. Instead, the subtitled movie has met the
masses, and vice versa. Big budget A-list-heavy movies such as Brad Pitt’s
polyglottal Babel sport their subtitles with unselfconscious pride.
Effects-filled fantasies such as Pan’s Labyrinth pull in the
punters, irrespective of their subtitles. A jungle adventure such as Apocalypto
is told entirely via subtitles and no one bats an eye. At the same time
Oscar-winning subtitled dramas such as The Lives of Others and
high-kicking audience pleasers such as the lavish flick Curse of the
Golden Flower are adored in equal measure.
So what’s changed? Why have we given up the old pretensions? Why do we not
recoil any more at the sight of subtitles? Why has the subtitled movie
ceased to be the preserve of the cappuccino-drinking, goatee-stroking
cineaste and become instead populist fodder for the multiplex?
The most obvious answer is that there has been a complete dissolution of the
barriers between so-called mainstream and art-house film-making. It’s no
longer Hollywood versus the rest of the world. It’s no longer the big
pyrotechnical popcorn movie from Tinseltown versus the thoughtful no-budget
head-scratcher from Cinecittà. Instead, thanks to the rapacious rise of DVD
culture, the omnivorous consumption of movies has become a global
experience. A quick click on any online store will get an action movie from
South Korea, a sci-fi movie from Japan and a dark erotic thriller from
France all delivered to your door in days.
These films are no less entertaining than their Hollywood counterparts simply
because they’re afflicted with subtitles. In fact, as revealed by the
increasingly frenetic trend for Hollywood remakes of so-called “foreign”
movies, the latter often have an originality in story design or character
quirks that safe studio movies are sorely lacking — see Martin Scorsese’s The
Departed , a slightly bloated remake of Hong Kong’s Infernal
Affairs . Or there’s that journeyman director Ron Howard’s upcoming
remake of Michael Haneke’s savage thriller Hidden , or the
comedian Chris Rock’s recently completed remake of Eric Rohmer’s French sex
farce L’Amour l’aprãs-midi , here called I Think
I Love my Wife .
Media-friendly movie geeks such as Quentin Tarantino have helped to spearhead
a shift in the consciousness of the film consumer by espousing a belief in
the democratisation of all movies. Tarantino, more than anyone, created the
notion that subtitled movies could be brash and achingly cool when he
announced, on a press tour for Reservoir Dogs (itself inspired by the
Hong Kong director Ringo Lam’s City on Fire ), that he had
cried during Wong Karwai’s propulsive Kowloon-set youth movie Chungking
Express because “I never thought I could love a movie this much”.
There was something inspired, and inspiring, about Tarantino’s enthusiasm for
all national cinemas, irrespective of subtitles. And it certainly bled into
the production mores of the 1990s. Here you had, postSundance Film Festival
success, an eruption of American talent making supposedly glum arthouse
movies (the Steven Soderberghs, the Richard Linklaters, the Spike Lees)
while around the globe film-makers were boldly playing Hollywood at its own
game. Thus subtitled French blockbusters such as Brotherhood of the Wolf
or Crimson Rivers unfolded like slickly packaged studio thrillers and
Russian movies such as Nightwatch displayed cutting-edge special
effects, while an entire invasion of profoundly eerie Japanese horror movies
such as The Ring and The Grudge showed a creatively
conservative Hollywood system how to make scary movies.
Add to this the giddy proliferation of cheap air travel, plus the shrinking
global village, and what we are witnessing is the steady demystification of
the notion of what exactly is “foreign” in the first place. Back in the
Nineties, the Generation X of film-makers and moviegoers turned inwards; now
directors and audiences engage with the world in an endless search for new
ideas. Certainly a movie from Hong Kong seems far less exotic and “other”
when you’ve spent three boozy nights knocking around Lan Kwai Fong. Ditto a
gritty urban thriller from the banlieue or a jaunty romantic comedy
from Rome. Why should we fear a movie, subtitles or no, from a place that
sells duty-free?
It’s hardly surprising, then, given the shift in both production imperatives
and audience appetites, when a French subtitled movie such as Asterix and
Obelix pops up at the local multiplex, or Amélie becomes one
of the year’s heart-warming box office champs. Nor is it surprising that the
most muscular film movement in years has come from Latin-speak-ing
countries: hard-hitting hyperkinetic films such as Amores Perros, City of
God and Y Tu Mamá También represent the cutting edge of
multiplex-friendly cinema. Yes they’re subtitled, but, damn, they’re
entertaining.
Thus in some way our journey towards becoming fully fledged subtitle lovers
has been one of mutual reciprocity. For, as we have bent towards the
subtitled film, so has it, in turn, supplicated itself before us. And what
we are left with is the perfect marriage of form and function. It’s still
ugly black strips and brutal white letters. But it’s never boring.
WORD UP: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY MOVIE SUBTITLES
A good read No Oscars are handed out for the best subtitles, but
regarded as one of the finest is Anthony Burgess’s rhyming-couplet
translation for Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), with Gérard Depardieu. But
not all films offer the same literary scope. As Deirdre MacCloskey, the
midwife to Pedro Almodóvar’s words, remarks: “He likes the minimum of
subtitles so they don’t detract from the visual.”
Many tongues The Oscar-winning Babel is an ambitious,
interconnected tale of family and borders set in four countries on three
continents. It also may well be the Mount Everest of the subtitler’s art.
The dialogue is spoken in Spanish, French, Japanese, English, Berber and
Arabic. And subtitles are even used for the character of a deaf-mute Tokyo
schoolgirl who signs in Japanese.
Funny lines Subtitles can now crop up even in a comedy such as Borat,
which helps out with the pseudo-Kazakh. But the film that uses subtitles to
the best intentional comic effect remains Annie Hall, when Alvy
Singer (Woody Allen) and Annie (Diane Keaton) engage in nervous, idle
conversation while their true thoughts are revealed on the screen.
Lost in translation In the Taiwanese version of My Super
Ex-Girlfriend, the line “We have a zero tolerance policy on this kind of
thing” became “We have a standard for sexual harassment”. But Hong Kong
action films provide the most striking English translations: “Fatty, you
with your thick face have hurt my instep”; “Beat him out of recognisable
shape!”; and “Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?”
