I was merely explaining why those movies don't work, and will never work for me.




Call me a a fussy viewer, but for period (or modern) historical flicks in particular I just can't get into them if they're filmed in the wrong language. Of course for obvious reasons it's far more problematic for me when it concerns a French speaking nation, but in general I have the same problem with other languages. It just feels wrong otherwise, and throws me out of the story.

The only exception for me are movies that go really far back in the past, eg: movies set in Rome. For those I don't mind in which language they shoot (though I wouldn't mind seing them in latin with subtitles, if it came to that).


The occasional actor will pull it off, but it's rare (and mostly it's specific cases, eg: a French actor could pull off playing Mazarin faking an Italian accent and broken French. Quite a few have, but these days in French (and many European) movies they usually don't even bother: they'll cast an Italian for Mazarin or Catherine de Médicis and a Spaniard for Anne d'Autriche and so on) - and if a French Studio intends to adapt, say, a famous German novel, they'll do it as a coproduction with a German studio and shoot it in German, (give or take a few token or even starring French actors dubbed in German in the cast, but I don't like when they do that). It woud not occur to Czech to go shoot in Czech an adaptation of Madame Bovary in France, or to cast an Italian to play a German officer in a WWII flick, and when Kurosawa adapted Shakespeare plays, he adapted them to medieval Japan. He didn't go and cast Japanese to play Brits...

If, say, a Polish director, wants to make a movie set in France, he won't do it in Polish, he will go shoot his movie in French in France.

It's pretty much just in Hollywood that the convention of pretending that English is the language of any country the story is set in is so widespread. The American audience don't mind, and a great deal of the rest of the world won't either as most American movies are dubbed (ie: most French people will see the Three Muskeeters dubbed in French, and they still won't like it much... it's still won't be believable that those characters are French to them).

It's nothing new with me, I have this "problem" with movies since childhood. I remember asking my dad as a kid why in Shogun the Japanese were speaking Japanese and all the others spoke English (well French, it was dubbed) and could understand each other when they were Portuguese, Dutch, Spaniard and what not. My dad tried to explain it was a convention, and that beside Americans didn't really care for stuff like this in their movies, but it never worked for me.

I don't have this problem in books. The convention to say for example "he told X in Spanish that etc." works just fine for me. In movies, language issues bug me massively.



It could be excellent, I still won't have a good time watching it as I won't be able to believe it's set in France, no matter what, and that ruins it for me. In this specific case, it just won't feel like Dumas to me in any other language (as Dumas's dialogue is way too iconic).

A good example of what I mean for English speakers would be: would Harry Potter be enjoyable and have any credibility if they had an all-American cast playing with American accents? The Brits would have hated it, and the American audience would not have believe it's set in Britain. A French story in France with American actors feels exactly like an Harry Potter with Americans speaking American English to me, just even worse.



Amadeus in particular didn't work for me. I don't remember Gandhi well enough. Not that Amadeus is bad, but for me.... no credibility re: the language issues. I don't buy the actors are the characters because of it, and as I don't buy it the movie is no fun to watch. In part I think that has to do with the fact language issues are so much a part of the fabric of European cultures. That's why I think Europeans tend to avoid the convention of using English (or their own language) as a lingua franca in movies. The European audiences just wouldn't buy it (except in dubbed American movies).

Gone with the Wind is a really bad example. I have no problem with a Belgian or a Québécois playing a French character as long as they're good actors. I have no problem believing Hugh Laurie is an American in House, or with Gillian Anderson playing a Brit in a British adaptation of Bleak House. Heck, I wouldn't even mind if Jodie Foster played a French as it would be credible. It's hardly the same as having Di Caprio as Louis XIV, or Jane Seymour or Kirsten Dunst as Marie-Antoinette (a French actress already works better if she can fake a credible Austrian accent and speaks credible German). It's not only a matter of language either. There are exceptions of course, great actors really into their part that will pull it off, but in the blockbusters like the Three Musketeers, they just don't bother with that. The actors just won't move, or be in the costumes the way French (or other latin Europeans) would. Most of the time it's just not credible. Part of the reasons why Schwarzman had no credibility as Louis XVI in Marie-Antoinette was that his body language was all wrong. He looked like a contemporary American in disguise, not a Frenchman.




I don't think that movie had much to teach about French history (or that it was one of its goal). It was a movie about how it might have felt to be Marie-Antoinette, more than anything else. Coppolla didn't really try to make it historically accurate. It was highly stylized and she took tons of liberties.

Part of the reasons why Coppolla's Marie-Antoinette really didn't work (it was a huge flop in France) is that her cast and the way they played lacked unity too much. Her angle was fun, the script was fun, the period recreation was lavish and the movie had a lot of cinematographic quality - this wasn't Hollywood fast food for sure... but her cast had like ten different ways of pretending to be French people. You expect this to happen in a blockbuster, but in a more "serious" film with a director who's made much research and preparation work like this, no. In her case, it also didn't help in France that she based her movie on a biography (and a vision) of Marie-Antoinette that few French historians agree with (and it's not a case of chauvinism, quite a few American historians who are specialists of France are highly regarded there). I still think she made a huge mistake of not making this movie in French (as a great deal of European directors would have chosen to do in her place), considering this was an auteur movie with fairly little commercial potential anyway.