Psycho. #26

“Is this film good, or is it just foreign?”

Are you ever watching a film and you’re thinking hmmmmm is this film good or is it just …. French? But seriously, I often struggle with deciphering whether someone is a good actor, I watched a film last night with Laetitia Casta in it and I legit couldn’t tell. I know this makes me pretty basic but do you think you give actors a more generous assessment if you don't speak their language or are you focussing more on their physicality, gestures etc Do I sound dumb?

I don’t think you sound dumb, and I reckon that in fact this question gets right to the heart of a difficulty in appraising international/”foreign language” film. The question isn’t merely about acting, I think, but about whether we can ever really understand or properly estimate a film (or book or even art) that isn’t in our own tongue, that speaks a different language to our own. What are our criteria for criticising a work of art that speaks in a different vernacular to our own? 

Many years ago when I shared a flat with friends, a film was on TV very late at night as my housemates and I sat drunkenly around, discussing this and that. The film was Indian — I have no idea what it was — but I must have drawled something like, “Oh my god, this film is so BAD” and one of my friends, a person whose drunkenness always seemed to awaken a strain of argumentative do-goodery, challenged me. What makes it bad?, he asked. I, suddenly on the backfoot, but wishing to appear clear-headed and fair, recited a list of would-be “objective” criteria: wobbly camera-work, chaotic blocking, colour palate, I don’t know what else. My prim friend would not back down: what was it that allowed me to pronounce those elements “bad” — was I not just talking about Western values, about ‘polite’ filmmaking that adhered to certain conventions I had grown up with? Etc etc, you can imagine the conversation, between two people sobering up at 2a.m. with the bit between their teeth.

I wish I could remember what the film had been — I suspect it genuinely was a crappy bit of filler — but of course my friend was right on the whole with his charge that I did not speak the language. How could I ever hope to assess this movie, which wasn’t made for me and which was completely outside of my own compass? 

I think that the issue of language — which I take to also mean culture, and accents, and idiom — is key to world cinema at the moment. Most of the international filmmakers who “make it” on the festival circuit all seem to me to speak English in a virtual sense, with certain mannerisms and affects and stylistic properties that are easily interpreted by an English-speaking audience raised on the Western canon — and indeed Bong Joon-ho, Yorgos Lanthimos, Luca Guadagnino and Ruben Östlund have all made films actually in English. The Joachim Trier film The Worst Person in the World, while it is animated with a kind of darkly Scandi-seeming stubbornness, still speaks English in much of its idiom, which appears to me to slot into a loosely post-mumblecore American indie vein. I’m interested in how often I go outside of my own language, how I am able to comport myself amidst a film that is, in the true sense, ‘foreign’.