by Mark Kermode
I am not alone in this. Everyone who has ever been on holiday to a country where the native language is anything but their own has experienced exactly the same thing. You board a plane at Heathrow looking like a recruitment poster for UKIP and you come back ten days later wearing a sombrero, drinking wine out of a pig’s bladder, singing ‘Torremolinos’, and making plans to retire to the Costa del Sol. OK, so it’s not a permanent state – it usually wears off somewhere between the horror of the baggage carousel and the dull thud of the delayed bus to the long-stay car park, which remind you that you are back in England. But for the time that you’re away, and however ‘inauthentic’ your experience may actually be, the fact is that most of us, when faced with a ‘foreign’ culture, learn to adapt pretty damned fast.
And we love it.
The same is true of movies. In fact, doubly so. Quadruply so. Once you’ve got over the peculiarly Anglo-American grouch of having to watch a subtitled movie, which involves reading and looking at the same time (a problem which devotees of furtive European arthouse porn never seem to encounter, strangely), audiences of foreign language films tend to find themselves strangely receptive to the myriad different ways of doing things that make the world such a terrifically diverse source of pleasure and entertainment. And it seems to me that a key element of this new-found acceptance is the fact that our brains work differently when they know that they are outside their comfort zone. Throughout history even the most aggressively nationalistic invading armies (the Romans under Hadrian, the French under Napoleon) have reported that the mindset of their soldiers has been fundamentally altered by the landscape, the food, the architecture and (most significantly) the language of the cultures they have attempted to occupy and obliterate. (If you don’t believe me, ask a Welshman why it’s so important that their native language, long-outlawed under English rule, is now taught in schools as a matter of course.) Even if you need a translator, the very sound and cadence of a ‘foreign language’ has a profound affect upon the listener.
Or, to put it another way, if you watch a movie in which everyone is speaking a language other than your own, you know that things will be done differently in this world, and you become almost instinctively alert to the hidden signs of these differences. Thanks to the oft-cited ‘international language of cinema’, most of the key cultural signifiers will be built into the visual architecture of the piece – not just its physical setting, but the entire mise-en-scène – along with the rhythms of the editing, the composition of the soundtrack, and all the other non-linguistic elements at work in the playing of a movie anywhere in the world.
All of which brings me to the second reason why I am living proof that English-speaking audiences can, in fact, understand foreign language films even if they have no prior knowledge of the culture from whence they came. To return to the example of Dark Water, the creators of the Hollywood remake knew that an Anglicised adaptation of Suzuki and Nakata’s haunting tale would have to take into account the differing customs of Western metaphysics and they re-ordered the story accordingly for American (and presumably English) audiences. Yet when I first saw Honogurai mizu no soko kara in Japanese it made perfect sense to me, despite the fact that what I knew about Japanese culture wouldn’t have filled the back of a very small postage stamp. Oh, I’d seen a few contemporary J-horrors like Ringu and Takashi Miike’s South Korean co-production Ôdishon (aka Audition), along with exported classics like Ugetsu monogatari and Kaneto Shindô’s Onibaba (aka The Hole). But I was certainly no expert, having grown up thinking that Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence was authentically exotic because it had a plinky-plonk soundtrack by Ryûichi Sakamoto, who used to play with the Yellow Magic Orchestra. So when I came to write an article for Sight & Sound magazine about the differences between Nakata’s Honogurai mizu no soko kara and Salles’s Dark Water, the first thing I did was to ring my good friend Tomoko Yabe to see whether my cockamamie conclusions about conflicting cultural traditions, which I had cooked up on the sole basis of watching the films, had any basis in reality. And, surprisingly enough, they did. Tomoko confirmed for me that the Japanese word ‘rei’ (the definition of which encompasses the soul of a person, the souls of ancestors and the mysterious invisible powers that are perhaps closer to gods) had very different connotations to the English word ‘ghost’; that water was indeed commonly viewed as a metaphysical gateway, something the Japanese movies I watched had made abundantly clear without ever having had to explain it; and that the epilogue to Honogurai mizu no soko kara (which Salles’s Dark Water doesn’t even attempt to recreate) was clearly intended to be poignant rather than terrifying, heartbreaking rather than horrific. Tomoko, who is an extremely generous soul, even went so far as to track down and send to me a selection of reading matter about Japan’s Shinto and Buddhist heritage, all of which merely reconfirmed what the movies had already expressed so eloquently. It really was astonishing to discover just how much you can learn about a country by spending some time in their cinema.
The point is that if a xenophobic Luddite like me can understand a subtitled movie on both a linguistic and cultural level, then frankly anyone can. These movies don’t need to be remade in English, because most of them make perfect sense in their original language, as would be immediately apparent to anyone who took the trouble to watch them in the first place. OK, so some people clearly have a deep-seated disdain for subtitles, a prejudice which American studios are entirely happy to reinforce, for obvious reasons. Yet throughout the rest of the non-English-speaking world, subtitles are accepted as a matter of course; indeed, in many Asian territories it is not unusual to find two separate sets of subtitles (Mandarin and Cantonese, for example) simultaneously running vertically and horizontally along the side and bottom of the picture. I remember being impressed by screenings at the Cannes film festival where a movie would be shown in one language, with French subtitles burned on to the picture and English subtitles being displayed on a second monitor strip beneath the screen. This seemed novel to me, but in many international territories it is simply business as usual. Only in the English-speaking world do audiences seem to have a problem with subtitles per se, and I am increasingly convinced that the root of the problem is nothing more than habitual. We are not in the habit of watching subtitled films. Why not? Because Hollywood keeps remaking them in English.
In the case of Dark Water, despite the best efforts of Jennifer Connelly and some genuinely impressive location work (most notably New York’s haunting Roosevelt Island), Salles’s remake disappoints on several levels. Yet with $25 million in US box-office takings, it still achieved a degree of financial success that would have been inconceivable for the subtitled Japanese original in the American marketplace. Since Salles’s remake cost a reported $30 million, it was (unlike its predecessor) technically a ‘flop’ – proving once again that nothing loses money like a mid-priced movie with a whiff of the ‘arthouse’ about it – but that is a factor which only has relevance for the financiers. As far as the English-speaking movie-going public were concerned, Salles’s version eclipsed Nakata’s film in an instant, consigning the original to secondary ‘source’ status, to be known only by navel-gazing cinephiles and horror fans – or ‘specialists’, as the marketplace now likes to call them …
Call us …
Call me.
Nakata ended up following the money to Hollywood and replaced Noam Murro as director of The Ring Two, which, despite the title, was actually not a remake of Nakata’s own Ringu 2 (nor indeed of Jôji Iida’s Rasen, Norio Tsuruta’s Ringu 0: Bâsudei or Dong-bin Kim’s The Ring Virus – all of which followed Ringu). Even though it’s probably the best that the ongoing American remake series is going to produce (The Ring 3D is due in 2012 – can’t wait), The Ring Two did little to establish Nakata as a bankable director in the West, and his generic UK-based follow-up film, the overwritten cyber-thriller Chatroom, was disappointing fare indeed. But at least Nakata got something out of Hollywood’s ambushing of his work, which is more t
han can be said for the creators of most subtitled films that suffer the remake treatment. As for Nakata’s fellow countryman Takashi Shimizu, he opted to exploit the situation to the hilt and got himself locked into a seemingly endless cycle of Japanese originals and English language remakes after hitting the financial jackpot with The Grudge. So far, Shimizu has directed six versions of Ju-on/ The Grudge, including two straight-to-video originals, two Japanese feature films and two American-backed English language remakes (he’s also been involved in a Ju-on computer game). To be honest, there’s really very little difference between the Japanese feature Ju-on (2002) and the Americanised (but Japanese-set) remake The Grudge (2004), save for the presence of Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar and the use of English dialogue, both of which helped the remake take $110 million in the US as opposed to the $325,000 earned by the original in the same territory. Even in Japan, the Hollywood version gave its Japanese source a run for its money, offering depressing evidence of a horrible cultural imperialism that has made American the default language around the globe.
Other international directors who have opted to ‘re-interpret’ their own work for English-speaking audiences have fared far worse. Top of the cautionary-tale pile is poor old Dutch maverick George Sluizer, whose CV includes the utterly awesome Euro-shocker Spoorloos and its unspeakably terrible American remake The Vanishing. When I first saw Spoorloos in a preview theatre on Wardour Street back in 1989, I was so freaked out by its claustrophobic finale that I almost fainted from fear. Watching Sluizer’s American remake a few years later in the very same theatre, I almost died of embarrassment as the heaving stupidity of the final act caused the assembled critics to roar with laughter and groan with disbelief. What the hell happened?
In the original (PLOT SPOILERS AHOY), our bedraggled anti-hero is buried alive by the horribly ordinary Raymond Lemorne (played in terrifying everyday fashion by a deadpan Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), discovering at last what happened to his long-lost love as he awaits his own imminent death. In the remake, our bedraggled anti-hero is buried alive by Barney Cousins (played in terrifying rent-a-mental fashion by a gurning Jeff Bridges), but then his new girlfriend digs him up and all three run around hitting each other over the head with shovels. Really. If someone else had done this to the original it would have been bad enough, but the fact that Sluizer did it himself (albeit under extreme duress and doubtless as a result of the tyranny of test-screenings, which leave all the most important artistic decisions to the lowest forms of multiplex pond life) was both horrifying and heartbreaking. Why would he do such a thing? For money, I presume; The Vanishing was unspeakably terrible on every level, but even with a miserable $14.5 million at the US box office, it still did way better than the Dutch/French language original and probably helped Sluizer pay a few bills in the process. OK, so (like Dark Water) the remake cost a load more to make, and was therefore comparatively less profitable than Spoorloos in real terms – whatever that means. But more English-speaking audiences saw the remake than the original, despite the fact that almost every single review of the film told them to avoid it like the plague and seek out Spoorloos on the arthouse revival circuit or on clunky old videotape (this was back in the days before DVD or VOD).
Fast-forward 14 years, and we find Austrian director Michael Haneke retooling his remarkable (if deeply unlikeable) German language torture-fest Funny Games for American audiences with similarly (if less spectacularly) flatulent results. Having made a stern name for himself with such gruellingly callous and intellectually cruel works as Benny’s Video, Haneke’s magnum opus on the evils of violent entertainment was unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, where it played with both French and English subtitles. The story is simple: two apparently civilised young men, dressed in tennis whites and surgical gloves, arrive at the door of a rich couple’s holiday home, ask to borrow some eggs and then proceed to humiliate, torture and kill the couple – and their child – for fun. The central (and somewhat simplistic) thesis of the movie is that the audience are distressingly complicit in the on-screen violence, much of which is actually off-screen, save for the sounds of death and dismemberment that creates the illusion of unwatchable visual horror. At key moments in the drama, the alpha psycho (brilliantly played by Arno Frisch, looking like Richard Gere’s Nazi twin) turns to the camera and asks the audience why they are still there, why they haven’t left the theatre. Some people did. As for me, I really wanted to walk out of the movie but couldn’t, because professional etiquette required that I stick it out to the bitter end. Believe me, if I hadn’t been compelled by my job description to see this thing through to the final reel I would happily have bailed. But you can’t review movies you haven’t watched in their entirety (a lesson I learned the hard way with Blue Velvet – see previous book) and having got into the screening in the first place (always a nightmare at Cannes) I wasn’t about to abandon ship before the final credits. My persistence paid off: having watched Funny Games from beginning to end I was able to vent my righteous anger about it in the pages of Sight & Sound magazine, complaining that Haneke was merely reworking ‘fourth wall’ ideas better expressed in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and accusing him of preaching to the converted by making a film that would never be seen by its intended ‘target’ audience (i.e. the enthusiastic mainstream consumers of what would later be called ‘torture porn’), who would never dream of watching a movie as archly academic as Funny Games.
A few years later, it transpired that Haneke himself had reached exactly the same conclusion. Having gone on to make far superior (and significantly less hectoring) films such as The Piano Teacher and Caché (aka Hidden), Haneke decided to revisit Funny Games which, he now claimed, had indeed failed to reach the audience who would benefit most from its traumatic power – namely the American masses who mindlessly lapped up the violent entertainment against which Funny Games railed. With peculiarly Teutonic logic, Haneke (who had previously told his producer that if Funny Games was a ‘success’ it would be because the audience had misunderstood it) concluded that there was nothing essentially alienating about the premise of his film per se, but that as a ‘foreign language’ venture the movie simply would never have the ear of a mainstream American audience. So he set about re-filming it, pretty much shot for shot but with an English-speaking cast headed up by Naomi Watts, who had scored such a big hit with the English language remake of The Ring. The result was Funny Games U.S., a spectacularly misguided venture which ranks alongside Gus van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho as a prime example of wanky navel-gazing by directors who seem to think they’re above the lumpen multiplex masses but would still like to take some of their money, thank you very much. Having declared with a splendidly straight face that there was no need to change anything about Funny Games (other than the language) because the original was damn near perfect, Haneke must have been somewhat surprised when the Anglicised polemic of Funny Games U.S. failed to gain any substantial traction either. In both the US and the UK, Funny Games U.S. was seen by pretty much the same audience demographic who had watched the original Funny Games a decade earlier – upmarket arthouse-friendly audiences who don’t mind being lectured about the evils of horror cinema, are up for a bit of a stern European telling-off (albeit with English dialogue), and who actually quite enjoy the purging experience of being made to feel really miserable and uncomfortable in the cinema. Of course, any of these liberal-minded souls who had already seen the original German language Funny Games would doubtless find themselves wondering what exactly the point was of doing it all again, particularly since the shot-for-shot nature of the remake suggested that Haneke hadn’t actually advanced as a film-maker over the intervening years (which, on the evidence of his other work, he most definitely had). More significantly, Haneke himself was made to look rather foolish, because his rigorously planned and clinically executed experiment in entryist cinema had in fact proved exactly the opposite of what he had avowedly set out to demonstrate – that the problem
with Funny Games was nothing to do with subtitles after all.
If you’ve seen either version of Funny Games, then you’ll understand immediately what was apparently so incomprehensible to Haneke: the reason the film had a limited audience was because it is such a gruellingly unpleasant and upsetting experience which offers the audience almost none of the traditional pleasure of cinema but asks them instead to either walk out of something they’ve already paid to see or sit and suffer in shamefaced silence whilst being made to feel bad about paying to see the film in the first place. I refer you once again to my experience of watching the film for the first time in Cannes and feeling furious that I simply could not leave. It may work in a lecture hall or as part of an A-level media studies course, but as a work of cinema Funny Games is simply intolerable. This doesn’t mean it’s not a ‘good’ movie, or that it fails to do exactly what the director intended, albeit within a rather limited context. But very few audiences will tolerate being told off for that long without some sense of gratification or reward en route. Popular revenge movies, for example, can harp on endlessly about the destructive search for retribution and the self-generating cycle of vengeful violence, as long as we actually get to revel in some of that senseless carnage and morally problematic bloodletting along the way. As for Funny Games, it’s just no fun at all. In any language.
So where does all this bad news leave us? Looking at movies from countries as far apart as Sweden, Japan, Hong Kong, Holland, France and Austria, it seems fairly apparent that remaking these films in the English language is not a solution to the ‘problem’ of their comparative unpopularity in the UK and the US, and may even be the very cause of the problem. In fact, audiences are actually more able to understand foreign language films in their original foreign language versions than they are to understand the necessarily altered and compromised English language remakes. Yet, traditionally, English speakers have a problem with subtitles, a problem not shared by the rest of the world and which merely works to diminish our communal cinema-going experience.
