Tea at Trianon: The Issue of Movie Accents

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

The Issue of Movie Accents

From Film School Rejects:

English language films tend to do something films from other parts of the world rarely ever do, and that is use accented English as a stand-in for a non-English language. You don’t, for example, see Germans making films where everyone is walking around New York City speaking American-accented German. (Sounds ridiculous, right?) We frequently even take it one step further, and just sort of sub in British-English accents for anywhere European, especially in films dealing with the upper echelons of society. It doesn’t matter if it’s the court of Louis XVI of France or Alexander II of Russia — it’s the Queen’s English for everybody. There’s a particularly delicious irony one feels watching a featurette for some Paris-set period piece in which the costume and set designers are going over the huge lengths they went to in the name of historical accuracy while the characters are all speaking in British RP.

Look, I’m not some starry-eyed idealist. I get why movies do this. American audiences, in particular, have a reputation for avoiding movies that require reading — that is, films with subtitles — like the plague. Non-English-speaking audiences are more used to dealing with subtitles or the sad joke that is most dubbing. While I can hardly even imagine the farce that is watching a film supposed to be set in your country in which the dialogue has to be dubbed into your language, I understand why it happens (even though it’s absurd).

It is perfectly valid to call out, say, Russell Crowe and/or Kevin Costner’s attempts at Englishness in their respective Robin Hood adaptations, or about 90% of all non-Irish attempts at various Irish accents (Cameron Diaz in Gangs of New York, Gerard Butler in P.S. I Love You, Tom Cruise in Far and Away, the list goes on). Once you venture into judging accents originating from non-English-speaking regions when the language being spoken by the actor is still English, the territory becomes a lot more complicated. (Read more.)