I saw at a friends The Beat My Heart Skipped recently. It’s a French film starring Romain Duris, a big star in France but pretty unknown more widely. He plays a property gangster, part of a gang who buy up freeholds, evict tenants through menace and violence, then by obtaining building permits through bribery and sell on the property for big profits. He stalks the streets of Paris walkman on, leather jacket done up, cigarette in hand, as a quintessentially French stylish violent hardman. Yet – and what a big yet – a chance meeting re-ignites his childhood passion for the classical piano. The plot of the film revolves in no small part around his attempts to pass an audition and be taken on as a concert pianist by a leading manager. This is played completely straight, not a hint of irony or bathos. (see the clip which sees him lay into his Vietnamese piano tutor with frightening intensity)
Now imagine the same plot with a British actor. Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch could do the tortured would-be maestro. No shortage of heavies and hard men. Tom Hardy, Tom Hiddleston to name but two. But the same actor? Only a French film could play such a proposition straight: one minute hammering out Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, the next hammering up dark stairs with a bag of rats to help evict another unlucky family (you see I can’t even write this straight).
What other films depend entirely on their national culture for plausibility?
That film is a remake of an American film though. Fingers, made in 1978 by James Toback. No idea how plausible the original is though…
Fingers didn’t make much of an impression on the world I think. But primo era Keitel and original casting de Niro I think could pull it off. Cumberbatch not so much.
Survival horror: the backwoods massacre movie, from Deliverance and Southern Comfort through to Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, really needs to be set in the States, where we can easily believe that whole tribes of inbreds live below the radar. There have been decent, ahem, stabs at it elsewhere — the French film Frontieres springs to mind — but nothing convinces quite like those dusty roadside gas stations and ripped-up flyscreens.
Same goes for the road movie. As we discussed recently Radio On and Soft Top… Just don’t have enough two-lane blacktop.
Would tend to agree that they really need to be set in the States.
However, the Belgian movie Calvaire includes a host of unpleasant locals who would give the Deliverance mob a run for their money.
Calvaire’s superb — props for even knowing it, Mars! — but it’s definitely not a survival horror. It has more of a British aesthetic (Straw Dogs, Wicker Man, the opening of An American Werewolf In London).
Much as I like Tom Hanks, he proved that The Ladykillers could only be English.
I haven’t watched the movie completely as I wish to watch it with friends, you made me wish to watch it with some willing swedes (there are few).
Then, about your question, there is a “would be” film that I can’t help but thinking about as in the middle of a “race-war”, one american director asked again to plan for a so-called “black James Bond”. Race is a construct and what make a person “black” is based on an archaïc idea of genetics.
Anyhow, let’s choose an actor with a real dark skin and he drives around in a luxury car as Daniel Craig in the US, he would be stopped rather often for, as Senator Tim Scott describes his own experience: “Was I speeding sometimes? Sure, but the vast majority of the time, I was pulled over for nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or some other reason just as trivial.”
I hate being right about that.
Remembering the bongo films of the 60s and 70s in Soho – I am not sure how discerning the clientele was, but the addition of “Swedish” to any film title seemed to add something . For example:
Librarians a-GoGo!
or
Swedish Librarians a-GoGo!
I dunno but I’ll tell you what IS implausible. Simon Pegg as ‘Scotty’. ‘Scotty’ had gravitas. He was not a buffoon the way Pegg plays him.
None of the actors in the latest incarnation are what their predecessors were.
In spirit I would say they are very close,all except you know who. I like Simon Pegg but he does rather play the same role Hollywood has allotted him.
Actually, what I meant to say is that none of the characters are what their predecessors were.
High School / College movies – you know the kind, with the obligatory scene where the new (male) students roll up in a red open top car outside the frat house,must in time to see a bikini party in full swing, and one of them lowers his sunglasses off his eyes to get a good gawp. These tend to be made in the US, in my experience.
Same for alien invasion movies, especially the kind where the extraterrestrials merrily blow up famous landmarks before being wiped out by verrucas or some such.
But is it not that we are conditioned to believe that the US is where grittiness occurs gratis? The italian boxset, Gomorrah effectively demonstrates that mob violence is infinitely more chilling and terrible back in it’s, arguably, spiritual home.
Swedish Librarians a Go Go? I missed that one. You’re quite right about how adding an exotic nationality made all the difference.
When I was a teenager, all things sinful came from Denmark. Danish Dentist on the Job was a must see for every adolescent boy. These “Mazurka” films were basically Scando Carry on movies with slightly more nudity.
This is a very interesting topic Mr Moles. In the field of comedy, humour is often based on snobbery and social aspirations. Alan Bennett is very good on the minutiae of this and such humour can’t easily be exported to another social context.
Imagine, for example, Wallace and Gromit in France, Oz, the US. It wouldn’t work in the same way.
I know Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown is now a stage musical, but none of Pedro Almodóvar oeuvre have been remade in the UK or USA. Can’t see something like Matador coming from anywhere but Spain.
@bigjimbob I think that Aldomovar’s hysterical and matriarchal world, pastel colours, high heels, terracotta walls is quintessentially Spanish and that whatever plausibility the film possesses depends on this. I watched this with minimole at the weekend in a spooky synchronicity – brilliant to see Antonio Banderas looking about 18 in great high-waister 80s suit.
Totally agree. Same goes for Jamon Jamon.
Unfortunately, Almodovar has slipped irretreivably into self parody. His last couple of films have been atrocious. He just about got away with The Skin I Live In, purely through Banderas’ central performance, which was much better than the script deserved, but since then…
In Chinese martial arts/historical dramas the characters can fly onto rooftops. Unless they do a Ninja Mary Poppins, I can’t see this translating well into UK/Hollywood movies.
Hot Fuzz makes great comedic use of this. All those US tough guy one-liners just sound silly in the bucolic English countryside.
It’s not just a geographical but also an historical thing. Can you imagine a contemporary remake of Brief Encounter?
Things have changed a little.
Bootie call at Clapham Junction?
Shaun of the Dead could only have been made in the UK.
The zombie/suburbia contrast is perfect. And of course, The Winchester.
There are not many countries in which one could do a remake of La Grande Bouffe. Without the obsessiveness about haute cuisine to be found in France and Italy, it would just be The Big Pig Out.