A Minor Observation on Foreign Films.

I watched Pak Chan-woo’s ‘The Handmaiden’ at the weekend, a film set in the 1920s with a tricksy plot in which two Korean thieves try to swindle a Japanese heiress.  Much as I enjoyed the sumptuous visuals – the gorgeous interiors of the Edwardian/traditional Japanese hybrid house, the close-ups of exquisitely made-up faces – the film was a little too arch and artificial for me. The incredible attention to details in costume and sets and the quirkily detached characters, reminded me of Wes Anderson’s films, and I wondered whether I would enjoy an English language version of ‘The Handmaiden’, set in a more familiar place.   

                But I suppose much of the enjoyment of watching a ‘foreign’ film involves seeing a place and people who are not familiar (in other words, not Americans), and in learning something new about another country or culture.  For most us, after years of saturation in its culture, the U.S. feels like a second home, even if we have never actually been there. We have seen the insides of a thousand suburban homes and city apartments, watched people drive SUVs on countless multi-laned highways, shop in malls and sit at the chrome finished bars of a hundred diners. And most of us are familiar with Depression-era New York, the wild west and the deep south of the civil rights era. 

And so it is refreshing to simply see something different, to see how people live in a remote village in nineteenth century Jutland in ‘Babette’s Feast’, or to watch the wild gypsy wedding in ‘Gadjo Dilo’ or to hear the drunken throat-singing around the campfire in ‘Mongol’.  Even if the script isn’t up to much, at least we take a trip away from our natural film environment.

This can also apply to movies set closer to home: the grey skies, small houses and poorly-stocked fridges of films set in Britain and Ireland often seem strangely foreign on the big-screen.