Silver Screens

The French are renowned for their fine achievements in the world of film* so the next step in my quest for self-gallification was to visit the tiny little cinema in the town of Montfort. It really is rather adorable: it shows one film a week (usually an old one) and only at the weekends, one screening per night. I decided there and then to pay it a visit, not caring what the film was. It made for an interesting experience...

I buy my ticket from the woman in the box office – ‘box’ being the operative word – who also has a small selection of Haribo sweets beside her for purchase. No popcorn or little tubs of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream here. Then, the usher – who is standing so close to me in the tiny foyer that he could have actually reached over and taken the ticket straight from the cashier – carefully inspects the ticket that he’s just watched me buy, rips half of it and directs me to the single screening room. Fortunately, it wasn’t busy enough to warrant a lady with a torch to show me to my seat because I don’t think I would have been able to suppress my laughter for that long. Still, with only nine of us in total in the cinema – me, my friend and two families – we were rather spoilt for choice when it came to seating so naturally, we found the two shortest people in the room and sat directly in front of them.

The film turned out to be 'Julie & Julia', a fairly recent American film with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, based on the true story of a woman who decides to cook all 524 of Julia Child's recipes in a single year. (Jen, you would love this film!) So, as if it wasn't weird enough for me already, I got to watch an English film dubbed in French, as subtitles are rarely used here. Everyone should, at least once, have the experience of hearing Meryl Streep dubbed by a crazy, drunk-sounding French woman.

A combination of France's love for American and British entertainment imports** and their reticence when it comes to subtitles means that most French people have no idea what many anglophone actors actually sound like. One student gushed breathlessly about the general loveliness of Johnny Depp, but in fact she is in love with Bruno Choël, his French voice-over double. She told me that she'd heard an interview with the famous Pirate once and didn't like his 'fake' voice - by which, of course, she meant his real one. I laughed when I read in The Kite Runner about two Afghan boys who thought that John Wayne was Iranian because he always spoke Farsi in the movies, but it seems that it is closer to reality than I believed.




* Namely, the ability to persuade an audience to sit through two and a half hours of 'characterisation' of characters they neither like nor identify with, and no discernible plot.

** And I'm not exaggerating this. In one of my classes today, I asked my students to tell me their favourite French television programmes, hoping to pick up a few tips about what might be good to watch. The answers I got? Friends, Desperate Housewives, Skins, The Simpsons and The X Factor.