The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  Of course there is one significant area in which foreign language films have found a foothold in the UK multiplex market, but that success was largely achieved (at least initially) by virtue of them not being in a ‘foreign language’ to a significant proportion of their audience. For the past 25 years, the UK Box Office Top Ten has regularly featured Bollywood movies, in which the primary spoken languages are Hindi and Urdu (with odd blasts of English). These films pack out both multiplex screens and ‘arthouse’ cinemas, where they merrily outperform their domestic and international competitors. In 2002, the crossover hit Devdas capitalised on a high-profile unveiling at the Cannes Film Festival by taking £1.6 million at the UK box office – a very respectable sum. At around the same time Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham… took £2.5 million in the UK – a figure that would have put many mainstream Hollywood productions to shame.

  Yet despite the huge popularity and financial success of movies such as Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham… and Kal Ho Naa Ho (which took £1.5 million in the UK), reviews and coverage of Bollywood movies have often been limited to specialist Asian publications such as Eastern Eye, Stardust, Cine Blitz and Filmfare, or to internet sites such as RadioSargam. com. The reason for this peculiar critical ellipsis is that, in the past, comparatively few Bollywood films were screened for the English-speaking press. Why? Because their distributors had long considered such outlets irrelevant to the films’ performance. In essence, these movies were not viewed as ‘foreign language’ fare at all – rather, they were Hindi movies for Hindi speakers.

  When writing a piece about this phenomenon for the New Statesman in 2004 I spoke to Tim Dams, news editor of the industry paper Screen International, who confirmed that ‘companies like Eros and Yash Raj, which distribute these films in the UK, have developed a fantastically successful niche market which has in effect bypassed mainstream English-speaking audiences and reviewers’. As a result, many British reviewers (myself included) would only find out about Bollywood releases when they showed up in the Screen International chart. Significantly, many of the titles that racked up such healthy figures in the nineties and noughties did so without the aid of subtitles. Indeed, at an eagerly anticipated press show of the gritty thriller Dev in 2004, there was widespread Babel-like confusion when a subtitled print failed to materialise (to the dismay of the assembled English-speaking critics). I muddled through on the strength of physical language alone, and understood some of what was going on, but others simply gave up. This was a real shame, because that screening had come about as a direct result of Eros (which had achieved notable hits in the UK with Chalte Chalte, Khakee, Baghban and Devdas) becoming the first major Bollywood distributor to join the Film Distributors’ Association, the UK-industry body that coordinates the national press shows at which (largely English-speaking) critics view each week’s releases.

  When I asked Eros’s managing director Kishore Lulla why his company was signing up to the FDA now, having achieved such extraordinary success without its assistance in the past, he told me that they wanted to become more involved in industry forums on piracy (a particular problem for Bollywood movies) and also to ‘take advantage of the national press show schedule’. This was significant because it meant that for the first time a UK Bollywood distributor was actively targeting English-speaking audiences, something that had never concerned them in the past. According to Rana Johal, key examiner of South Asian movies at the BBFC, the reason for this shift was two-fold: on the one hand, Eros clearly wanted to expand its market to non-Asian audiences, particularly since Bollywood movies were fast gaining international critical respect; more significantly, they needed to hang on to the increasing number of second-generation Asian immigrants for whom English was now their first (and perhaps only) language. ‘We’ve started to see a marked rise in subtitling in the past few years,’ Johal confirmed in 2004. ‘Bollywood movies are a great transmitter of culture, and the kids want to see them to make that cultural connection. But many of them do not necessarily speak the language of their grandparents.’ By coincidence, at almost exactly the same time, the Channel 4 reality show Bollywood Star was reaching its tear-jerking conclusion, during which much was made of the contestants’ ability to act with their eyes rather than their voices – a relief to one of the contestants, who had made it to the final despite being unable to speak a word of Hindi.

  Intriguingly, as subtitling has become more commonplace for Bollywood movies (meaning that more and more of their viewers are not primarily Hindi speakers), their extraordinary success in the UK has continued. Apparently, Eros’s attempts to hang on to the next generation of core-audience viewers (for whom Bollywood movies are effectively ‘foreign language’ fare) are working, and the company continues to go from strength to strength. More importantly, here is evidence that a large section of the UK market, who have been raised on movies spoken in a language other than their own, are entirely at home with subtitles. Which can only be a good thing.

  If only the rest of us could become equally comfortable with the concept of subtitled movies as part of mainstream entertainment. If only we’d all been raised on the fruits of international cinema. Wouldn’t that be great? And wouldn’t a good way of achieving that goal be to introduce a quota system, whereby multiplexes were required to show one foreign language film for every four or five English language offerings? After all, wasn’t the whole point of the multiplexes in the first place to offer us more choice?

  In a word – no.

  As far as choice is concerned, multiplexes have never been a positive force for change, nor will they ever be. In the same way that the proliferation of satellite-TV stations has merely led (in the words of Bruce Springsteen) to ‘57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)’, so the explosion of the multiplexes that now dominate the UK’s film-going landscape has simply offered cinema-goers a greater number of screens showing the same thing. Bollywood movies only found a foothold in the multiplexes because they came with a large and devoted audience and they reliably make money – lots of it. No one in the multiplex planning rooms is programming those films through any desire to be ‘diverse’. If you want diversity for diversity’s sake, you have to look outside of the multiplex system, to the independently programmed cinemas whose cultural roots are buried deep in the soil of the once-flourishing repertory circuit. It is these cinemas that have consistently provided an alternative to the dominance of Hollywood blockbusters for UK audiences, catering to audiences who want something other than the movie they last saw adorning the front cover of Empire magazine. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with those movies – Inception was one of them, for heaven’s sake. But take a look back at the covers of the UK’s most popular movie magazine and you’ll notice a distinct absence of foreign language fare. (Indeed, I struggle to think of a single issue of Empire that has run with a foreign language film on the cover, although there must be a few … musn’t there?) This is neither a coincidence nor a conspiracy. As the UK’s biggest-selling movie mag, Empire is simply reflecting the predominant interests of the mainstream movie market, in which foreign language films have always been essentially marginal.

  But what if multiplexes were required to show more of them? Wouldn’t that improve the situation? Strangely, no – in fact, it might well make the situation worse. Indeed, there is an argument (which I first heard passionately espoused late one night in the bar of the Bristol Watershed, after one too many pints of the old Johnny-Knock-Me-Down) which says that multiplexes should be expressly forbidden from ever showing foreign language films, and be restricted solely to the exhibition of formulaic Hollywood fare. You want to hear the argument? Well, I’m going to tell you anyway. It goes something like this …

  Unlike multiplexes, independent cinemas in the UK struggle from year to year to maintain a balance between showing a wide selection of movies from around the world that reflects the enormous artistic diversity of international film, and getting enough bums on seats to be able to continue showing that enormous diversity of film in the
future. As we all know, the cutting-edge movies that represent the very best that cinema has to offer as an art form are very rarely the same movies that constitute the top-grossing products of the year. This may change in the future – blockbusters may indeed become better (see Chapter Two). In the meantime we have a marketplace in which, for whatever reason, artistic merit has little or no relationship to financial success, and in which foreign language movies, no matter how brilliant they may be, will always be a harder sell than their English language equivalents. Thus it falls to independent cinemas to provide a counter-programming service which offers an alternative to the homogeneity of the mainstream, showcasing movies (often ‘Not in the English Language’) which are never going to do the kind of business upon which multiplexes depend. But every now and then you get a ‘break-out’ movie: a film typically destined for the independent cinema circuit which somehow captures the popular imagination and causes cinema-goers to break the habits of a lifetime. The classic examples of this strange phenomenon are French movies like Jean de Florette and its sequel Manon des Sources; or Italian language oddities such as Cinema Paradiso or Il Postino (the latter of which is technically a British movie); or even – to play devil’s advocate – Mel Gibson’s insanely violent religious epic The Passion of the Christ, the dialogue of which was entirely in Latin and Aramaic, and which proved that everyone can deal with subtitles if you give them enough gratuitous gore and theological guilt.

  All of these movies broke out of the subtitled ghetto and into the mainstream market, reaping healthy profits in the process. And by rights, such rich rewards should be shared by the independent cinemas that have supported subtitled movies all year round – with little or no financial reward – and who rely on this kind of irregular windfall to balance the books. Yet as soon as the multiplexes get a whiff that a foreign language film might be a money-maker after all they go in like sharks in a feeding frenzy, and their attentions are understandably hard to ignore. Think about it: if you’re the distributor of a foreign language film that suddenly starts to attract interest from the multiplexes, you’re immediately going to start wondering whether a wider audience awaits you in Screen Six of the local enormodrome than in Screen One of that bijou arthouse venue which has been stoically showing your niche movies to small or moderately sized audiences for as long as you can remember. And should you decide to place your movie in the multiplex, where it may or may not hold its own against 14 screens of competing Hollywood fodder, then you will inevitably be knocking a sizeable dent in the profits of the independent cinema, which really needs these breakout hits to survive.

  By way of comparison, think of the NHS spending all its time and money teaching doctors and nurses to do their jobs so brilliantly in public hospitals and GP surgeries, and then the private sector (which has invested no time or money in their training whatsoever) coming along and stealing the cream of the crop with offers of bigger pay cheques to provide services for paying customers only, using skills that were funded by the taxpayer in the first place. Just as private medicine could not survive without public healthcare, so the few foreign language hits that flourish in the multiplexes only do so because they have their roots in the soil of the arthouse circuit. If you allow the multiplexes to cream off the hits, you will, in fact, strangle the lifeline of foreign language cinema in the UK.

  OK, so it’s only an argument and, as I said, one espoused in a state of advanced refreshment by someone who was on the verge of becoming the armed-wing of independent cinema programming. But you must admit there is a kernel of truth in there somewhere. And peculiarly, the evidence of this truth is offered most starkly by a genre of films whose greatest problem is the very fact that they don’t qualify for ‘foreign language’ status. I am talking of course of the always embattled ‘British Picture’ of which I spoke in the previous chapter. As we know, the biggest obstacle for the indigenous UK film industry is not production but distribution, and the more one looks at the sea of Hollywood product filling UK screens, the more it becomes apparent exactly why that is the case. Thanks to the export success of American cinema – a cinema which apparently ‘speaks our language’ – British film-makers have effectively become foreigners in their own country. Whereas subtitled imports have a hard time finding screening space in the mainstream market because they require subtitles, the insurmountable hurdle facing British movies made in English is the fact that ‘American’ is, to all intents and purposes, not a foreign language and therefore does not require subtitles. Would that it did. When George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Oscar Wilde, or maybe even Winston Churchill) joked that England and America were ‘two nations divided by a common language’, he had no idea just how divisive that common language would prove in terms of the British film industry.

  It is no coincidence that countries in which English is not the mother tongue have imposed far more severe quota systems to ‘protect and preserve’ their national cinema than we ever have here in the UK. In France, for example, a quota system was introduced in 1928 – in response to the welter of cheap American product flooding the market – requiring distributors to offer one French film for every seven imported films. In May 1946, the Blum–Byrnes agreement opened France up to American movies (in return for erasing part of the national debt) but established a new quota of four weeks of French films per quarter, which was later increased to five. In June 2004, Argentina ratified a quota system that required all exhibitors to show at least one local film in each quarter for each screen – meaning that a 16-screen multiplex would have to show 64 Argentinean films a year! Similar quota systems have been enforced over the years in countries as diverse as Italy, Brazil, Korea, Malaysia, Portugal and Spain, all of which have in some way helped stimulate or preserve domestic production in the face of overwhelmingly American competition. In 1930, as part of his First Five-Year Plan, Stalin took the ultimate sanction of banning the import of all American films into the USSR outright, thereby boosting Soviet production by freeing up more screens to show home-grown films of the ‘Boy Meets Tractor’ variety. And, as recently as March 2011, the World Trade Organization was still trying to strong-arm China into allowing more than a mere 20 foreign language films to be shown in its cinemas each year, a government-imposed limit that generates a staggering boost for home-grown productions in a marketplace where annual box-office receipts have long exceeded the $1 billion mark. No wonder Hollywood is lobbying so hard for a larger slice of the action.

  Now, as anyone with an ounce of common sense will tell you, quotas are effectively unenforceable in an age in which DVDs and internet downloads can easily traverse national boundaries – it’s no surprise to discover, for example, that the black market for Hollywood films in China is massive (as we noted earlier, restrictive distribution practices are a breeding ground for piracy). But when faced with the behemoth that is the American film industry it’s equally easy to understand why governments resort to such quotas, particularly if their national cinema is in a language not catered for by Hollywood. While many people instinctively see trade barriers as a restriction of their freedom of choice, many more understand the need to preserve the production of entertainment that speaks to them in their own language. Imagine how postal American audiences would go if six out of seven movies showing in their local multiplexes were in a foreign language and required either redubbing or subtitling. No matter how convoluted quota systems may seem, there will always be a home market for movies made in the mother tongue.

  Which is great, unless your mother tongue is American, which as far as the British film industry is concerned, it is. In the typically prescient words of Elvis Costello, our indigenous film industry now struggles for survival in a country in which we ‘don’t speak any English, just American without tears’. For UK films, there is simply no language barrier to separate our cash-strapped home-grown productions from being eaten alive by bloated Hollywood fodder. Linguistically they exist on an even playing field, which is no help at all when everything else (production we
ight, distribution muscle, promotional clout) is loaded so heavily in favour of our American friends. In the one area in which non-English-speaking nations have some say in the ‘Undeclared War’ (to use David Puttnam’s phrase) with Hollywood – the persistence of their national language – the UK has been rendered horribly mute. If the Americans are already making movies in our language, why the hell do we need to make our own?

  What’s the point?

  The upside of this equation, we are constantly told, is that our own movies enjoy the privilege of being able to be exported to America, where they can play in the multiplexes because, although they’re technically ‘foreign’, they don’t need to be subtitled (unless they’re Trainspotting). Yet if you look at the British movies that do indeed reap such rewards in the US (and which tend to be the same movies that do so well at the Oscars – see previous chapter), you’ll find that very few of them are actually as British as you may think. Take The King’s Speech, which, despite being an English language production (obviously), is actually a Weinstein-backed Anglo-Australian affair considered Down Under to be their first ever Best Picture winner. (Blimey, next thing they’ll be wanting independence …) Or what about The English Patient, another Oscar winner whose very name screams home-grown credentials but which, as previously noted, was actually rescued by Miramax when funding floundered and which is correctly listed on the Internet Movie Database as being a US/UK co-production (rather than the other way round)? Or Braveheart, which was set in Scotland, filmed in Ireland, directed by an Australian and financed by Americans? Or The Full Monty, whose stripping Sheffielders owed so much of their success to the support of LA-based Fox Searchlight? Or Four Weddings and a Funeral, which was produced by the British arm of PolyGram who are, in fact, Dutch? Ironically, the biggest recent British hit was Slumdog Millionaire, which is set in Mumbai, and a large proportion of which is in subtitled Hindi.