The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  Costing around 16 times as much as its South Korean source, and boasting star names both in front of and behind the cameras (the screenplay is by feted Proof playwright David Auburn), this syrup-drenched supernatural whimsy achieves stupidity at a genuinely international level; it really is one of the dumbest films ever made.

  Now, it is possible (but not, as Lieutenant Kinderman would say, ‘probable’) that all the idiocy of The Lake House is in fact present in Siworae/Il Mare and the Hollywood hogwash is simply an accurate translation of Korean crapness. I can’t comment because (like most people in the Western world) I haven’t seen Siworae, and nor am I ever likely to now, having been permanently put off the idea by the sheer mind-bending awfulness of The Lake House. And therein lies one of the great myths of the English language remake racket: that somehow the success of translated Hollywood knock-offs (which may well bear very little resemblance to their international predecessors) will draw attention to the other unseen originals. What nonsense! Just think about it: if a mainstream audience sees an English language remake of a foreign language film and finds the experience really satisfying, why would they bother seeking out the original – what would be the point? They’ve already enjoyed the movie in English, why should they watch it again with the subtitles that were precisely the reason they’d never bothered with the foreign language original in the first place? And if the English language version sucks, the situation is even worse. Can you honestly imagine someone paying good money to watch a really lousy movie in some overpriced multiplex, hating it, and then going home and getting straight on the internet to buy the original from Amazon in order to see whether it sucked even more? It’s just not going to happen. For proof, ask yourself how many people you know who actually tracked down Siworae after enjoying or being appalled by The Lake House.

  The answer is no one, right?

  Quod erat demonstrandum.

  It would be easy to use The Lake House as a touchstone text that proves just how thick-headed Hollywood remakes of foreign language films tend to be. But the problems of translation are far more complex than Western film-makers simply doing a bad job of adapting Eastern texts, or English speakers having a tin-ear for European dialogue. There are underlying issues of cultural, linguistic and locational specificity which mean that no film can be lifted from the context of its creation and relocated to a foreign shore without fundamentally changing the original text to the point that it may cease to have any of the value which made it seem such a desirable commodity in the first place.

  Or, to put it more simply, no matter how tactfully, artfully or respectfully an English language film-maker approaches the issue of translating a Japanese language film, a Japanese movie can only work in Japanese.

  Let me give you an example.

  In 2004, as part of Vertigo’s efforts to bring so-called ‘J-horror’ hits to the West, acclaimed Brazilian director Walter Salles helmed a US-set remake of Hideo Nakata’s masterpiece Honogurai mizu no soko kara (aka Dark Water). Like Ringu, Dark Water had its roots in the writings of Koji Suzuki (‘the Japanese answer to Stephen King’), and told the haunting story of a recently separated single mother and her young daughter, who are forced to live in a run-down apartment block amidst increasingly acrimonious divorce and custody proceedings. Plagued by a mysterious dampness that seeps endlessly from the ceiling, and disturbed by the sounds of footsteps in the apparently abandoned rooms above, the mother starts to fear for her sanity as she imagines a mysterious lost girl coming back to haunt her and her daughter. Is the apartment, with its infernal plumbing, beset by the spirits of the undead? Or is the mother (who has wrestled with her own psychological demons) simply descending into madness?

  For my money, Nakata’s original Dark Water is one of the most underrated films of the noughties, and arguably one of the greatest screen ghost stories of all time. On a recent (and rare) trip to the theatre, I was particularly pleased to discover that the creators of the ‘spooktacular’ West End hit Ghost Stories (which has been causing audiences to shriek and jump like those scaredy-cats during the Paranormal Activity trailers) had cited Dark Water in their glossy programme as one of the Top Ten Scary Movies of All Time. It is scary. But more importantly, it’s really sad. Like so many truly great horror movies, Dark Water is a film that uses supernatural themes to dramatise profoundly natural emotions, and at the heart of its spine-tingling spell is a profound sense of loss mingled with a protective acceptance of the burden of parental responsibility.

  Is this selling the movie to you?

  No? Thought not. That’s why the front cover of the UK DVD says ‘The most shocking film yet from the director of THE RING!’ (which, incidentally, most people know from the English remake) rather than: ‘A profound sense of loss mingled with the burden of PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY!’

  Such is sales talk.

  Salles’s Dark Water remake (which actively eschews any sense of shock) is an interesting beast – the work of someone who clearly understands what’s so great about Nakata’s original, and as such it’s in a completely different league to either Verbinski’s dunderheaded translation of Ringu or Takashi Shimizu’s enjoyably empty-headed retooling of his own endless Ju-on series. Having previously helmed the profoundly humanist Che Guevara biopic The Motorcycle Diaries, Salles was renowned for drawing outstanding performances from his casts and for almost wilfully addressing an audience more mature than the average multiplex adolescents. Yet, like his predecessors in the Hollywood J-horror market, the Brazilian film-maker clearly faced a dilemma regarding how much – or how little – of his source material’s cultural baggage to retain in the rush toward Americanisation. Because although both Suzuki and Nakata are clearly well-versed in the traditions of Western chillers (you can detect echoes in Dark Water of Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Polanski’s Repulsion and Kubrick’s The Shining), there are some elements of their storytelling that are so deeply rooted in the Japanese kaidan eiga (ghost-story film) tradition and its kabuki theatre ancestry as to seem utterly alien to American audiences.

  For obvious reasons, the concept of ghostly spirits and their relationship to the ‘real’ world varies wildly from culture to culture. In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s wonderful Thai oddity Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, for example, a deceased wife materialises matter-of-factly at her dying husband’s dinner table while his lost son reappears as a glowing-eyed apparition of a monkey – and no one (least of all the audience) registers the faintest degree of surprise, let alone alarm. When Uncle Boonmee became the unexpected winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2010, several people (myself included) made lots of cheap jokes about how much we’d like to see Hollywood have a go at remaking that one. Just imagine the meeting: ‘Yeah, we rilly lurved the Uncle Boonmee character, who we’ve “re-imagined” as an eighteen-year-old jock with a life-threatening sports injury named Boysie. But as for these ghosts and that undead monkey boy thing – dontcha think they should be a bit more … scary? After all, they are, like … dead.’ On a conceptual level, the language barrier was the very least of Uncle Boonmee’s problems as far as Western multiplex acceptance was concerned; it was the ideas themselves that such an audience would struggle to understand.

  Despite the apparent box-office appeal of English language J-horror remakes, a brief glance at the Japanese kaidan eiga cannon from which the source texts draw so much inspiration reveals a similarly unfamiliar attitude to the undead. Look, for example, at Satsuo Yamamoto’s Kaidan botan-doro (aka A Tale of Peonies and Lanterns) or Masaki Kobayashi’s prize-winning anthology Kwaidan (aka Ghost Stories) or, most significantly, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu monogatari (aka Tales of a Pale and Mysterious Moon after the Rain), all of which exhibit a distinctly un-Western acceptance of the supernatural that seems to be rooted in the animistic elements of Japan’s Shinto heritage. ‘Unlike ghost stories in the West,’ wrote American critic Roger Ebert in his typically thoughtful review of Ugetsu monogatari, ‘Mizoguchi’s film does not try to startle or shoc
k; the discovery of the second ghost comes for us as a moment of quiet revelation, and we understand the gentle, forgiving spirit that inspired it.’ Presenting its ghosts in a solidly human form that leaves both audiences and protagonists largely unaware of their otherworldly nature, Ugetsu monogatari had a profound influence on Nakata, both for its iconic lakeside set pieces (which are echoed throughout his waterlogged chillers), and for the neo-realist flavour of its ‘supernatural’ scenes. Significantly, Nakata also cites Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan (aka Ghost Story of Yotsuya) as indicative of the fundamental divide between Eastern and Western ghostly traditions; he told the Japanese arts and culture magazine Kateigaho that ‘the difference between Japanese and Western horror can be traced back to the difference in religious beliefs. When making horror films, the methods of describing the spirit world and the expression of horror are totally different between Japan and the West.’ While Suzuki points to writers such as Junichiro Tanizaki, Naoya Shiga and Natsume Soseki as evidence that ‘Japanese literature is full of ghosts’, film fans need look no further than the runaway domestic success of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (a childhood fantasy in which a young girl finds employment in a bathhouse for spirits) for proof of the ease with which Japanese audiences of all ages embrace such concepts. ‘The supernatural [is] such a large part of the Japanese culture,’ agrees Salles, ‘in the way they don’t question it in the way we question it. It’s much more a part of their world – not something they visit every now and then, as we do.’

  This is not to say that Japanese audiences are never scared by ghosts – clearly teenage fans of the original Ringu movies were completely creeped out by the vengeful apparition of the lank-haired Sadako, an incarnation of an iconic kaidan eiga figure whose heritage can be traced back through the chilling ‘Black Hair’ segment of Kwaidan and beyond, and who represents a genuinely threatening presence. Yet in a culture in which everyday spirits exist within the most mundane settings, even within household objects (the distressed spirit of a broken clock, for example), the mere presence of ghosts is neither unnatural nor alarming. Indeed, the absence of such spirits would be unusual in certain contexts, most notably in relation to bodies of water, which in the East are commonly associated with the metaphysical. ‘Walking along a body of water you sense ghosts being born,’ Suzuki told the readers of Japanese magazine Kateigaho, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Yet when being interviewed by a British magazine, Nakata felt the need to explain that ‘Japanese ghosts are supposed to appear where water exists’ and to clarify the ‘strong connection between water and the supernatural’ that has underwritten his most celebrated works. Elsewhere, he reminds us that ‘water, scientifically speaking, is the mother of life, but it also takes an enormous amount of life. I think Japanese people all share that kind of fear …’

  All of which is a rather long-winded way of saying that as soon as you ‘translate’ something that has its roots in one culture into the parlance of a foreign audience, more gets lost in translation than just the language. Nor is this a one way street: Dark Water screenwriter Rafael Yglesias (who had written for Polanski on Death and the Maiden and whose work Nakata had therefore almost certainly seen) made it quite clear that he felt there was something lacking from Ken’ichi Suzuki and Yoshihiro Nakamura’s original script, most notably in the apparent passivity of the central mother character. In Yglesias’s version, the supernatural elements that beset American actress Jennifer Connelly (inheriting her leading role from Japanese star Hitomi Kuroki) are made more explicitly psychological, filling the thematic void left by downplaying the foreign metaphysics and thereby realigning the piece as a cracked character study in which all the action is essentially driven by the film’s star rather than her environment. According to producer Ashley Kramer, Yglesias effectively ‘transformed the more passive Japanese heroine of the original into a very poignant and relatable American single mom trapped in a personal dilemma’. And in ‘creating a very strong and memorable female character [who] … would make for a compelling core of the film’ the US version also shifted the narrative away from the external ghosts, spirits and even locations of its Eastern source, drawing a more explicitly psychological veil over the otherworldly presences of Honogurai mizu no soko kara to create what Yglesias tellingly calls ‘a very American ghost story’.

  At first glance this shift may seem both sensible and inevitable: if an American audience won’t understand or be familiar with the underlying themes of the original Japanese story, then surely there’s no point in writing those themes into an English translation of the script. Better to abandon the foreign concepts altogether and come up with something more ‘relatable’ (a ghastly word in any language) to a Western audience, and more appropriate to a Western cast and setting. After all, an American single mom probably wouldn’t react to the rising tide of portentous disturbances in the same way as a Japanese mother in similar circumstances. Changes have to be made, right?

  Right.

  But here’s the rub. What if those changes only have to be made because of the very act of translation itself? What if the original Japanese story wouldn’t make sense to a Western audience simply because it had been moved to the West? Would an American or English audience have intuitively understood the strangely alien metaphysics of the Japanese story had they watched it in (subtitled) Japanese? Doesn’t the whole root of the problem come down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what it really means to be a stranger in a strange land?

  I think the answer to this question is a resounding ‘Yes’, and I would like to offer myself as living, breathing proof of that truth. Firstly, I am at heart a terrible xenophobe: an Englishman with an overly developed attachment to his Manx heritage who lives, breathes and thinks like a ‘little islander’, and who is most at home in his own home or having a pint at his local pub. If you asked me to pick a character from literature who most embodies my own outlook on life, I would choose Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the dressing-gown-clad humbug who travels the galaxy and sees the wonders of the universe but still spends most of his time worrying about where he can get a decent cup of tea. Or Dougal from The Magic Roundabout, who reacts to every new crisis by threatening to write an angry letter to The Times (in the days before it was owned by Rupert Murdoch). I am not proud of this but I know it to be true that, left to my own devices, I would never stray more than a couple of miles from my own front door. Worse, I would not read any books that I had not already read, meet any people whom I had not already met, or allow any changes to be made to my immediate environment which would cause me, in any way, to have to re-evaluate the world as it already exists inside my own head.

  To be clear: I do not like change.

  And yet somehow I have managed to experience the world outside of North London first-hand – I have been to Tokyo and New Orleans and Disneyland Paris, and all those other places where they do things so differently. (Incidentally, the thing they do most differently in Disneyland Paris is smoke, with every parade and ride queue engulfed in a poisonous cloud of freshly exhaled Gitanes fumes.) And I have enjoyed the experience – immensely. I have been privileged to eat freshly caught tuna at a sun-scorched beachside bistro in Grenada; to promenade with young lovers in the cool evening air of Barcelona; to take a tram to the borders of three countries on one ticket in Basel; and to argue with a waiter about the meaning of the word ‘vegetarian’ (‘Is not meat, is pork!’) in Lisbon. None of this would I have done had I not been eternally bound to somebody (Linda) who really looks forward to ‘going abroad on holiday’, and who has often had to fight tooth and nail to drag me kicking and screaming on to a plane so that I might broaden my minuscule horizons and see the rest of the world for the wonderful thing that it is.

  And it is.

  Crucially, the minute I’ve actually got anywhere to which I had claimed I really didn’t want to go, I’ve realised just what a fool I’d been to resist going in the first place, and found myself overwhelmed by
the wonder of everything that just wasn’t English. Now, I know what you’re thinking, that I’m just some naff Shirley Valentine clone who’s been seduced by the cod scenery of a summer holiday and intoxicated by the prospect of a naked swim and a quick shag with a moustachioed Tom Conti. And frankly, you’d be right. But what’s important is not the authenticity of my experience of the ‘world’ as an economy-class tourist but rather the fact that, when forced to visit a foreign culture, I found that I both enjoyed and understood it a lot more than I had ever expected. Why? Simply because once there, I knew that I was in a foreign land where they ‘do things differently’ and, like every other two-bit tourist in town, I was able to watch and learn how things work outside of the M25, and generally get the hang of ordering a meal, or buying a beer, or renting a hire car that had at least four wheels. The fact that I was in a foreign country where everyone spoke a language I didn’t understand (I remain spectacularly monolingual) actually added to my ability to adapt to unknown customs. If anyone spoke English, I simply assumed that they did things the same way I had always done, but the minute I was faced with dialogue which was ‘Not in the English Language’ I became surprisingly open-minded (a first for me) and oddly receptive toward the rituals and peculiarities of otherwise alien cultures. In short, my lack of linguistic understanding made me more receptive to the difference of foreign cultures.