The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  ‘This award,’ I had quipped, ‘honours movies which take us deep within another culture, movies from around the world which can be understood by anyone thanks to the universal language of cinema and the miracle of subtitles … but which Hollywood will nevertheless feel the need to remake in English.’

  Well, I thought it was funny …

  This admittedly unremarkable aside drew a few polite chuckles and the very faintest suggestion of applause from the auditorium of the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden, along with some notable silences from the assembled Hollywood bigwigs, none of whom knew who the hell I was and many of whom had made large amounts of money remaking foreign language films for audiences who are too stupid to read subtitles. Indeed, later on in the ceremony Best Director winner David Fincher was unable to receive in person his prestigious BAFTA for helming The Social Network because he was too busy working on his new movie – an English language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

  Poetic, huh?

  The real reason I looked so sour up there on stage was that I had spent quite a lot of time prior to the ceremony learning how to pronounce the names of all the various creators of the five films nominated for the Not in the English Language (NITEL) award – a total of 13 names, many of them featuring crossed-out ‘o’s, underlying squiggles, acute accents, conjoined vowels, and dots. Foreign languages have never been my strong point, but as someone whose name when mispronounced (as it almost invariably is) sounds like a portable toilet, I hated the idea of screwing up someone else’s moment of BAFTA glory by bending their name out of shape with my stumbling English tongue. So, having tracked down a list of phonetic interpretations, I had attempted to commit to memory the correct pronunciation of each film-maker’s name, be it Juan José Campanella (Argentina, for The Secret in their Eyes), Luca Guadagnino (Italy, for I Am Love), or Etienne Comar (France, for Of Gods and Men). I already knew how to pronounce Alejandro González Iñárritu (Mexico, for Biutiful) because I’d interviewed him years earlier when Amores Perros became a controversial hit at the Edinburgh Film Festival and I had made such a balls-up of his name that he felt justifiably compelled to correct me on air. Any of these names could have come out of the envelope – the contents of which are kept secret from everyone, including the presenters, until they’re actually read out up there on stage. Earlier on, whilst dashing to the men’s room for a last-minute pee, I ran into British actor Dev Patel, who was also presenting an award, and when I asked him what category he was doing he blithely replied, ‘Who knows – as long as it’s not foreign language film with all those unpronounceable names!’

  Thanks, Dev.

  My biggest difficulty on the pronunciation front had been getting my head around ‘Søren Stærmose’, the producer of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, whose name featured a couple of terrifyingly alien-looking/-sounding vowels, only one of which I recognised. Sadly, the place from which I recognised it was the opening sequence to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which famously features humorous cod-Swedish subtitling under the otherwise boring title credits. ‘Wi nøt trei a holiday in Sweden this yër?’ ask the subtitles, as the various set designers and lighting riggers get their moment of glory. ‘See the løveli lakes, the wøndërful telephøne system, and mäni interesting furry animals, including the majestik møøse …’

  The image of the ‘majestik møøse’ which ‘once bit my sister’ (‘No realli! She was Karving her initials øn the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge – her brother-in-law – an Oslo dentist …’) has stayed with me since I first saw Holy Grail at the Barnet Odeon back in 1975, and I have believed ever since that the Swedish language was packed full of ‘ø’s. It isn’t. In fact, it is packed full of ‘ö’s, which are an entirely different matter. If you want to find an ‘ø’ you need to go to Denmark, where they speak Danish. I know this because I asked my trusted colleague, Hedda, who is from Holland and speaks both Dutchish and Swedish, and she assures me that there aren’t any ‘ø’s in either alphabet. I also checked with a Norwegian (‘Norvege Nul Points’), whose language has lots of ‘ø’s, and they said the same thing. At least I think that’s what they said, although since they said it in Norwegian I can’t be 100 per cent sure. Hedda says she doesn’t speak Norwegian, but is pretty good at French and German, which is impressive but doesn’t really help here. On balance, I think it’s safe to assume that the collective Pythons made a humorous but linguistically inaccurate goof, and the subtitler’s sister was actually bitten by a mööse rather than a møøse. Which is relevant because, although The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a Swedish language film based on a Swedish language book and set largely in Sweden, its producers are actually Danish. And the Danish language sounds completely different from Swedish, apparently. Sadly, I don’t know any Danish people (and on the basis of Lars von Trier’s genital-slicing Antichrist I’m not in any hurry to change that) so I had to rely on the pronunciation advice of a Norwegian (who spoke Danish but not English) and a Nederlander (who spoke English, Swedish, French and German but not Danish). As for me, I passed my French O-level on the third attempt and can do a pretty good impression of the Swedish chef from the Muppets, but neither of those talents was going to cut the mustard in the Royal Opera House.

  All of this (the Pythons, the moose, the Muppets) was running through my mind during that endless ‘…’ as I stood there on the BAFTA stage gathering myself to have a run at the names Søren Stærmose and Niels Arden Oplev, and looking like Nixon trying to pass a kidney stone. Before walking out on stage, I had resolved to take my time: to say the names silently in my head first before allowing them out into the world, and then to deliver them clearly, proudly, and with a sense of international confidence. And you know what? It paid off! I got both the names bang-on, so note perfect that anyone listening would have thought that I was born and bred in Copenhagen. Don’t believe me? Well tough – you’ll never be able to prove otherwise because the only person who heard me utter those names was … me!

  As was perhaps predictable, the moment I uttered the words ‘The Girl …’ the crowd erupted into spontaneous applause and any subsequent uttering was duly drowned out by the well-earned whooping and cheering of the assembled Dano-Swedish alliance, who appeared to have turned out in force. Clearly their film was a popular win and its makers promptly rose to the occasion by bursting into tears on stage – the first tears of the evening.

  But wait, I hear you say, weren’t the BAFTAs televised? Surely those super-sensitive TV microphones will have picked up your moment of pronunciation triumph, allowing us all to experience the clarity of your diction as if we were up there onstage with you? Sadly not, since the version of the BAFTAs which went out on BBC1 that night did not include the Film Not in the English Language category, save for a final fleeting also-in-tonight’s-show glimpse of yours truly saying ‘The Girl …’ and a shot of Stærmose and Oplev looking really happy. Why? Partly, I suspect, because nobody wants to watch Richard Nixon passing a kidney stone at what is meant to be a fun, upbeat fiesta of film-makers and their frocks. I was prepared for this, having been similarly snipped from the broadcast version of the ‘TV BAFTAs’, at which I presented an award for best documentary in my customary undertaker-on-a-day-out fashion. But, more importantly, one may well conclude that the Film Not in the English Language category failed to make the main body of the BBC broadcast because it was just too marginal, too specialist, too niche for a mainstream television audience.

  This is a shame, because had the award been televised, viewers would have been treated to a glimpse of some of the very best films of the year, including Of Gods and Men, an electrifying drama about French Cistercian monks facing life-or-death decisions in an Algerian monastery, which was my second-favourite film (after Inception) of 2010. Based on the true-life tale of missionaries who were kidnapped and executed by local militia, Xavier Beauvois’s gem had picked up the Grand Prix at Cannes and was looking like a strong contender
at the BAFTAs, and yet had failed even to make the shortlist for the Oscars’ NITEL category. This was nothing new; whereas eligibility for the BAFTAs’ NITEL prize requires merely that a film be (guess what?) not in the English language, the selection process for the American Academy’s equivalent category is Byzantine balderdash of the highest order which requires each country to select and submit just one film for consideration. This leads to all manner of internal squabbling within said countries about which movie deserves their national seal of approval (France, for example, had to decide in 2008 whether the Czech/UK/ US-affiliated La Vie en Rose or the Iranian-based Persepolis best represented ‘French cinema’ – ludicrous!) and propagates the popularly held American belief that no country in which people speak a funny language could possibly produce more than one decent movie a year.

  As for the BAFTAs, ask yourself this: if the forthcoming English language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo wins an equally significant award early next year, do you think that the broadcasters and newspapers who cover the increasingly prestigious ceremony will relegate David Fincher’s victory to the realms of the ‘also rans’ as they did with Søren Stærmose and Niels Arden Oplev? Of course not. Why not? Because Fincher is American (rather than Danish) and therefore more inherently ‘mainstream’ (in the English-speaking world) than his Scandinavian counterparts. Sad, but true.

  No wonder Hollywood executives are so keen to devour and regurgitate ‘world cinema’, remaking versions of foreign language movies which could not possibly be improved upon by the process of translation. Take Let Me In, an utterly unnecessary Anglo-Americanisation of Tomas Alfredson’s genre-redefining 2008 Swedish gem Let the Right One In. Based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (which in turn took its title from a lyric by Morrissey, pop’s very own Moaning Myrtle), Alfredson’s eighties-set chiller used a tentative vampire-story template to conjure a heartbreaking coming-of-age tale about a bullied schoolboy and a mysterious young girl who claims to have been 12 ‘for a long time’. As the odd couple’s awkward friendship grows, so blood flows, seeping quietly into the virgin snow of the bleak Stockholm suburbs in which both the novel and the film are very specifically set.

  ‘It’s true that the Swedish suburbs are perfect for a vampire story,’ Alfredson told me when I met him in 2009, prior to presenting him with the prestigious ‘Kermode Award’ for Best Film (the award taking the form of a golden statuette which looks oddly like Richard Nixon). ‘It’s a scary place, with twenty hours of darkness a day in January.’ The fact that Sweden had precious little horror heritage – and certainly no major vampire tradition – merely added to the sense of strange isolation, with Let the Right One In seeming to have appeared ex nihilo, its arrival every bit as enigmatic and inexplicable as that of the mysterious Eli, brilliantly played by young actress Lina Leandersson. ‘I think I saw Dracula and Frankenstein on television as a child,’ said Alfredson, who claimed to be otherwise totally ignorant of the long-standing traditions of horror cinema. ‘But I try not to study other films because there are too many people just “blueprinting” movies. I looked more to music, literature or painting for inspiration, particularly the beautiful work of Hans Holbein. The expressions he finds in faces are very creepy. But I don’t even know if Let the Right One In is a horror film. I just want to make movies that make people laugh or cry. For me, this story is very much about the anger that this tormented boy is carrying. He’s not able to do anything with it. He can’t talk to his parents because he’s shy and he’s afraid of them interfering; he cannot talk to his teachers; he has no friends. So for him, the vampire in the story is the body of all this anger. I had similar experiences as a boy and that moved me when I read the book, the feeling of wanting revenge without having the ability to get it. The other day, I spoke to a 76-yearold man who told me that when he was twelve they nearly killed him at school, and he’d never been able to talk about it until seeing the movie. After seeing the film, he’d been crying for two weeks and he wanted to say thank you. It made me cry too.’

  Reading back the text of that interview, it seems clear to me that Alfredson was astutely identifying several key qualities, all of which contributed in strange and wonderful ways to the intangible success of Let the Right One In. In no particular order, these contributing factors were: the fact that the film, like the source novel, was set in Stockholm; that it was made by someone with no track record in the horror genre; that it was not essentially a vampire movie, but a movie about kids which just happened to feature vampires; that it was primarily intended to make the audience cry rather than scream. Now try to imagine what would happen if you systematically inverted every single one of those unique and exceptional elements that had alchemically created what was for me the very best film of 2009. Taking that list in order, you should be imagining something that was: not set in Stockholm; made by film-makers firmly ensconced within the horror genre; essentially a vampire movie which just happened to feature kids; intended to make the audience scream rather than cry.

  Et voilà! You are now imagining Let Me In, the 2010 English language remake of Let the Right One In which is: set in modern-day America; made by the reborn Hammer studio, arguably the oldest horror factory in town; essentially a vampire movie which just happens to feature kids; marketed with the prominently featured endorsement ‘The Best American Horror Film in the Last 20 Years: Stephen King’ and ‘The Scariest Vampire Movie I’ve Seen in Years! New York Post’.

  Does that make you want to scream? It should do.

  You wanna hear the really bad news?

  When Let Me In tanked at the box office (it took around $12 million in the US – which is still $11.5 million more than Let the Right One In could ever have made in that subtitle-phobic marketplace) its failure was widely blamed on the (erroneous) claim that it had stuck too closely to the original, and wasn’t dumb enough for English language audiences! This despite the fact that Let Me In entirely ditches the spine-tingling ambiguity of Alfredson’s original in favour of by-numbers horror clichés (glowing eyeballs, shrieking sound cues) and ill-fitting CGI effects, which see Chloe Moretz transform from a young girl into a spider-walking bat-creature before our very eyes. Infuriatingly, director Matt Reeves (who previously helmed the effects-heavy sci-fi horror Cloverfield) seems to have understood just enough of what was great about Let the Right One In (whole set pieces are restaged) to mimic and desecrate it at the same time, leaving you wondering just who the hell this damned movie was made for. Surely no one smart enough to appreciate the brilliance of Låt den rätte komma in would have a problem with subtitles in the first place? And, by the same token, surely no one dumb enough to have a problem with subtitles would have any interest in a movie as intelligent as Let the Right One In, even if it had been remade in English with silly special effects and crowd-friendly horror clichés?

  Yet despite the fact that Let Me In flopped, the comparative box office for ‘Subtitles vs. Remakes’ figures tell a sorry tale indeed. Time and again, regardless of quality, English language remakes of foreign language films have outperformed their predecessors financially, even if the remakes stink to high heaven and horribly mutilate (or even obliterate) the memory of the original. When Gore Verbinski (who helmed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies – go Gore!) took an English-language hatchet to Hideo Nakata’s genre-defining Japanese horror Ringu, he scared up $128 million in the US and a total of $230 million worldwide with The Ring, ludicrously outstripping the success of the Japanese version, which was cheaper, cleverer, and (crucially) scarier. Shamefully, Nakata’s epochal original (which followed a Japanese TV movie and had already been remade as a feature in Korea) was subsequently re-marketed on DVD as ‘the original movie which inspired The Ring’, as if the naff American version had now become some form of Platonic ideal in relation to which all other versions of this Japanese tale now existed. Ask someone if they’ve seen The Ring nowadays, and the chances are they’ll think you’re asking them about the Verbinski schlocker. If you me
an the Nakata version, you actually have to say, ‘Have you seen Ringu, you know, the original Japanese version?’

  To which the answer is usually, ‘No, but I did see The Ring …’

  The remaking of Ringu was just the tip of an iceberg that saw Hollywood attempting to translate a slew of ‘new wave’ Asian hits for the mainstream English-speaking market in the ideas-strapped noughties. Titles included Takashi Shimizu’s Japanese frightener Ju-on (2002), which was remade (by its original director) as The Grudge (2004), with money and sequel-spinning results; Hideo Nakata’s Honogurai mizu no soko kara (2002), which was remade by Walter Salles as Dark Water (2005), more of which in a moment; and Danny and Oxide Pang’s Hong Kong shocker Gin gwai (2002), which was remade as The Eye (2008), featuring rising star Jessica Alba. Central to this transnational trend were canny entrepreneurs Roy Lee and Doug Davison who, spying a lucrative hole in the market, set up Vertigo Entertainment to sell the remake rights of Asian movies to American studios. At its most successful, this policy resulted in the aforementioned Best Picture and Best Director Oscar wins for Martin Scorsese, whose Boston-set thriller The Departed was a Vertigo-brokered remake of the Hong Kong Infernal Affairs trilogy (aka Mou gaan dou I–III, 2002/3). At its worst, it gave us The Lake House (2006), an English language remake of the South Korean romantic fantasy Siworae (aka Il Mare, 2000) which re-teamed Sandra Bullock with her Speed co-star Keanu Reeves, who plays a talented-but-troubled architect (stop laughing at the back). Sandra and Keanu share the eponymous lake house, although due to a Doctor Who-style warp in the time–space continuum, they are separated by a two-year ellipsis, which can only be breached by placing notes in a mailbox that acts as a portal between dimensions. (Time-travelling note to Sandra: ‘Dear Ms Bullock. If you are reading this letter in the past, please save the future by not making this lousy movie.’) Sandra and Keanu are in love, or would be if they’d met. Actually, they have met – and talked and kissed. But she has a convenient habit of forgetting what her old boyfriends look like and he can’t remember her because, hey, he hasn’t met her yet! But he can plant trees outside her apartment that spring up overnight without anyone noticing, and she can send books and scarves back into the past without precipitating the sort of ‘butterfly effect’ catastrophes with which sci-fi writers have wrestled for years.