Some Blue Eyed Revisionism

Men Who Hate Women (or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as the publishers will insist on calling it) is just a week away from it’s UK wide release, and the TV/newspaper wide coverage is starting to reach fever pitch. The booming voice has slipped into a TV spot even more breathless than the knuckleheaded advert discussed in the last post, and from a few adverts in the papers it seems like every publication and its’ dog is giving MWHW (aka TGWTDT) a solid four, if not five out of five.

Which is no bad thing, as I can’t think of a single Swedish title which has ever had comparable pre-release hype. Take your pick of any worthy or big Swedish classic, and I can assure you it’s never found 30 seconds of airtime during the advert break of Death Wish on ITV. The Swedish film industry has desperately been striving for an international breakthrough hit that will warrant the attention of the non-arthouse masses, and up until now repeated been failing at the task miserably. Case in point: the collossal flop that was Arn: The Knight Templar, a multilingual mess of a crusading action film. Built on a successful trilogy of books by a multimillion selling indigenous author, I doubt Svensk Filmindustri have ever thrown so much money in the direction of a single film. When said film then flops to the point of not even breaking the British or American DVD market, then you’re talking about a film of a sub-Seagal standards, without the comfort of the unintentional laughs.

Along comes another multimillion selling trilogy of Swedish books that are, shock horror, actually pretty good in the first place. But talk of not knowing a good thing when you see it, Stieg Larsson’s smash trilogy is optioned, and then commissioned for Swedish television. Recording starts, and it seems that halfways through the recording of the first book someone had the bright idea that maybe this could be sold much better internationally as a feature film. The rest as they say, is history.

It seems to be a trend that top-drawer television is growing to struggle with more and more, and the issue has been echoed in the UK with the Red RidingTrilogy . Another trio of feature length TV specials with a strong literary source, shot with big indigenous names in front of the camera, and genuine visionaries behind it the end product is programme which literarlly pops off the screen. The trilogy has been touring across the States garnering wholly justified ecstatic write-ups from every corner smart enough to look in it’s direction. To have the New York Review of books declare the trilogy ‘better than The Godfather’ carries no small weight. Even Swedish critics have been looking across at the trilogy with hungry eyes, calling for a similar mini-tour to put the ‘film’ back where it belongs: the cinema.

[for fine words on Red Riding and it's striking/stifling use of location and landscape, you could do a lot worse than check out David Forrest's take on 'The North as Abstract' over at Words on What I've Seen.]

While Red Riding has found it’s feet abroad as a markedly British art feature, the selling of the first part in what the distributors are calling ‘The Girl’ trilogy is being played on completely different terms. Audiences familiar with the Anglicized version of Wallander will be more than prepared for ‘The Girl’, as it comes from exactly the same production company (Yellow Bird Films), utilising a lot of the same crew in the production of the film. Both have a very similar feel, bleached colours palettes, following broken souls looking for answers in a series of brutal acts, which in part are endemic of Sweden’s national failings.

The audience unfortunate enough to be stuck in front of Death Wish last weekend will now be approaching ‘The Girl’ with anything BUT the above criteria in mind. The marketing engine can’t seem to decide if ‘The Girl’ being Swedish is a good thing or a bad thing. As previously discussed, the trailer remains mute, but for reasons known only to the advertising team, the promotional material would have you believe that Lisbeth Salander is blue eyed. The exact detail isn’t made clear in the books, and in a straw poll of two the verdict leant towards the literary Lisbeth having green eyes. What is certain is that actress Noomi Rapace has brown eyes, so there’s no doubt that some sort of photoshop skull-duggery is at hand. Which begs the question, why bother?

To present a a sharper vision of Swedishness? Sexy blue-eyed liberal foreignness, a scando marketing tag anyone can get on board with? Maybe if you consider the country in terms ‘racial purity’ and ‘ayrianism’, which last time I checked was one of the very cornerstones of what Stieg Larsson spent his life fighting against. A mountain out of a mole hill maybe, but bloody daft whichever way you cut it.

European Silent Cinema Trailers

Or more precisely the case of the mute trailer.

The sad fact is that Brits, as a whole, can’t stand listening to foreign tongues. Much can be made of the abysmal standards of modern languages teaching in the British school system. Marry that with the ‘everyone speaks English, why bother’ attitude and you’ve got cause for the unashamed dislike of many things culturally ‘foreign’.

In film circles this manifests itself in the bizarre notion of someone being ‘not too keen on subtitles’. By extension of the same logic you should have audiences biased against films with a lot of red in them, as ‘it’s quite demanding of your attention’ and ‘you can’t really relax when watching a [red] film’. In reverse the liking of predominantly [red] films is seen as a pretentious affectation, and some of those who actively seek out [red] films wear it as some sort of badge of honour. ‘If you didn’t see the original [red] version then you may as not have seen the film. The Hollywood remake is far too bland and unimaginative, and it overlooks a side of the film which is inherently [red] y’know?’

But laboured analogies aside, and Cannes and Oscars gongs aside, Brits can very rarely be sold on foreign language films. [Try convincing a class of undergraduate students that an American film is actually foreign and you open a whole new tin of worms.]

How then do you sell a foreign language feature to this stubborn audience? Quite simple: you make it mute. Which is not to say that you hark back to the good old days of silent cinema, but that you keep all the characters in any trailer from actually saying a word. It’s absurd to think of it, but once you notice it you’ll quickly realise that no one ever says a word in foreign language trailers.

The story which first flagged the idea was when audiences apparently walked out of The Lives of Others precisely because it was full of foreign speak. The trailer had led them to believe that it was in English, and would the box office very kindly refund them as this was obviously cut and dry deception of the highest order. That anyone would assume that a film about the Gestapo could ever be in English makes you wonder how apocryphal the story actually is, but the point remains. The scary fact is that The Lives of Others presents a very clear example of the muting process in action.

US Trailer :

The film’s initial release in the US was two months before it came out in the UK. Looking at the US trailer we can see it is 1min49secs long. Look at the UK trailer and you can note is only 1min27secs long. The only difference is that the UK trailer as had every iota of dialogue snipped out of it.

UK trailer :

Dumbed down trailers are nothing new, but to think that the only way cinema advertisers can engage with British audiences is by actively deceiving them is a return to a very sorry standard. The boom of foreign language films in the UK and US through the fifties and sixties was of course fuelled by the now totemic work of Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa and de Sica. The dark underside to this was that these films were often actively marketed as seedy and salacious imported films for ADULTS ONLY. While the sexual/emotional frankness matched with the chance of seeing some boob kept the seedy cinemas of Soho filled with Bergman, one particularly noteworthy advert in the New York Post sold de Sica’s Bicycle Thief as a sexual film of transgressions. Social realism doesn’t sell. Sex does. Go figure.

Arguably the selling of The Lives of Others taps into that as well, with the American DVD cover showing the Gestapo’s auditory voyeur sensationally listening in on the saucy bohemian playwright making passionate love to his creative muse. That’s not really what the film’s about, but it gets the Dirty Mac Brigade in all of us to at least pick up the DVD and have a closer look at it.

The two strategies of obscuring a film’s nationality with overplaying its sexy-sexy foreignness is coming to a nadir with the English language release of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The Swedish trailer released last year plays up to the film’s strong narrative pull, the slow uncovering of a grander conspiracy through hard-nosed investigation and archive sifting. The two main characters Lisbeth and Mikael get reasonably equal billing, and the trailer culminates in quick cut action. It’s pretty representative of the film as a whole.

Looking at the dubbed German trailer a lot is made of the original novel which was incredibly popular in Germany. Again the detective novel aspects of investigation, archive cracking and the unlocking of secret codes is foregrounded, culminating in some breathless but unexplained action.

Get to the UK trailer and the frying-pan-around-the-head bluntness starts with the bass-y voiceover of reckoning from the spirit of Don LaFontaine. ‘HER JOURNEY HAS BECOME AN INTERNATIONAL SENSATION. HER SECRETS HAVE CAPITAVTED MILLIONS. THIS YEAR…’

The whole film is about Lisbeth and her secret, and lots and LOTS of action. The British distributors have even acquired the domain www.thegirl.co.uk for the film, just so we all know who the focus of the film is supposed to be. Poor acne scarred Mikael doesn’t get a look in, and heaven forefend if we should catch a glimpse of paper, or perhaps a file of archive materials.

And of course no one besides Hollywood -Voice-Over-Man gets a word in edgeways. You’d be forgiven for mistaking this for the Hollywood remake that’s already being negotiated. Shame that they can’t highlight the film’s inherent [red]ness, and how like pretty much all modern films from [red]land, that it’s largely about the failing of the [red] social model. After all the original [red] title was Men Who Hate Women, but I guess that wouldn’t trip off Hollywood-Voice-Over-Man’s tongue so well. But what do I know, I’m just half [red] anyways.