Do you have a favourite Alain Delon film you'd recommend?Le Baron wrote:Relevant to this thread... The passing of Alain Delon, at 88. A giant of French cinema.
A Language Learner's Forum Film Club
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Re: A Language Learner's Forum Film Club
DaveAgain wrote:Do you have a favourite Alain Delon film you'd recommend?Le Baron wrote:Relevant to this thread... The passing of Alain Delon, at 88. A giant of French cinema.
Several!
Plein Soleil
Le Cercle Rouge.
Monsieur Klein.
Il Gattopardo
Borsalino.
Flic Story
La Piscine (though as much for Romy Schneider).
The one where he's an ex soldier from the Algerian war (?)
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L'insoumis?Le Baron wrote:The one where he's an ex soldier from the Algerian war (?)
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Re: A Language Learner's Forum Film Club
DaveAgain wrote:L'insoumis?Le Baron wrote:The one where he's an ex soldier from the Algerian war (?)
Yes, that's it. I just checked Wikipedia.
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I’ve recently seen two films in German. The first one was Oscar-nominated “Das Lehrerzimmer”. I quite enjoyed it, my wife did too, even though the ending was rather abrupt and left us wondering why the film ended they way it did (so I can say it definitely makes you think). It’s about a teacher who decides to discover who steals money from the teachers’ lounge and once she discovers the culprit, things get out of hand. The main character is of Polish descent and when she’s interviewed for the school newspaper, she’s asked if she speaks Polish, to which she replies in Polish: “Ciekawość zabiła kota”. When me and my wife heard this, we exchanged “what the hell was that?” looks because it was a literate translation of the English proverb “Curiosity killed the cat”. However, this is simply not how you say it in Polish! You have to say “Ciekawość to pierwszy stopień do piekła” (or “Curiosity is the first step to hell”), there’s no other way. It’s as if the screenwriters just used Google Translate but if they made the main protagonist German-Polish, they should’ve checked the proverb with a real Pole, especially that “curiosity” is what unleashes the series of unfortunate events in the film. Anyway, it’s a good film, quite easy to follow in German (with tiny bits of Polish and Turkish here and there).
The other film is “The Zone of Interest”, which won the Oscar for Best International Film against “Das Lehrerzimmer”. For me personally, it was quite difficult to follow German dialogues, and I had to rely on subtitles. Possible reasons: my German is not that good, background sound plays a prominent role in this film and dialogues were muffled by it, and on top of that there was a lot of background noise in the arthouse cinema where I saw this film. And to be honest, the dialogues are not that important in my opinion, the most crucial element is what is left unsaid by the director. I think Glazer made a perfect horror movie, one in which the horror images are induced in the viewer's brain by his/her imagination and not what they see onscreen. The film is spectacular, I think Glazer is one of the most interesting directors working today, he tries to push the boundaries of cinema by incorporating sound and music as equal elements to the image.
The other film is “The Zone of Interest”, which won the Oscar for Best International Film against “Das Lehrerzimmer”. For me personally, it was quite difficult to follow German dialogues, and I had to rely on subtitles. Possible reasons: my German is not that good, background sound plays a prominent role in this film and dialogues were muffled by it, and on top of that there was a lot of background noise in the arthouse cinema where I saw this film. And to be honest, the dialogues are not that important in my opinion, the most crucial element is what is left unsaid by the director. I think Glazer made a perfect horror movie, one in which the horror images are induced in the viewer's brain by his/her imagination and not what they see onscreen. The film is spectacular, I think Glazer is one of the most interesting directors working today, he tries to push the boundaries of cinema by incorporating sound and music as equal elements to the image.
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Re: A Language Learner's Forum Film Club
I’ve seen some other films where languages play a significant role. “Decision to leave” is a South Korean film from 2022 that tells the story of a Chinese immigrant suspected of killing her husband. She says she doesn’t speak Korean very well (but it’s clear she understands quite a lot) and when she needs to talk about her feelings, she resorts to Chinese – which is then translated into Korean by an online translator. Interestingly, in the first half of the movie these Korean translations are voiced by a male automated voice in her smartphone but in the second half (which takes place 1.5 year later) we can hear them through a female Korean voice. I guess the director wanted to show the progress of technology in that area? Overall a good movie with a rather convoluted plot, my wife gave up after 30 minutes.
“Las Herederas” is a Paraguayan film about an elderly lesbian couple forced to sell their belongings to make ends meet. They belong to a higher social class, so they speak Spanish, but I naively expected to hear some Guarani as well since 90% of the population speaks it. However, we don’t hear it even once in the film if I’m not mistaken. After watching the film, I checked Wikipedia and was surprised to see a number of Guarani borrowings in Western languages (such as jaguar, piranha and country names Paraguay and Uruguay).
“Las Herederas” is a Paraguayan film about an elderly lesbian couple forced to sell their belongings to make ends meet. They belong to a higher social class, so they speak Spanish, but I naively expected to hear some Guarani as well since 90% of the population speaks it. However, we don’t hear it even once in the film if I’m not mistaken. After watching the film, I checked Wikipedia and was surprised to see a number of Guarani borrowings in Western languages (such as jaguar, piranha and country names Paraguay and Uruguay).
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Re: A Language Learner's Forum Film Club
I’ve seen some other films with a prominent focus on languages. “Drive My Car” is the Oscar winner from Japan in the category “Best International Film” (deservingly so but when did they rename this category? I’m sure it used to be called “Best Non-English Language Film” or something like that). It lasts 3 hours and I firmly believe that a film should not be longer than 120 minutes – after watching it, I still have the same opinion but this movie was strangely intriguing and I enjoyed being immersed in the storyline. The main protagonist is a theatre director who is preparing a theatre piece with perfomers coming from all over Asia for the most part. His method is to allow actors to speak their parts in their native languages (with Japanese subtitles for the audience). I’m not sure it adds much to the viewer’s experience at the theatre to be honest, but we can hear Korean, Korean Sign Language, Mandarin, Tagalog, German and I’m sure also one of the Indian languages could be heard in one of the subplots. This film makes me want to read finally some Murakami as it is based on one of his short stories. Oh, and there is a dialogue in the movie in which they say that Korean’s grammar is very similar to that of Japanese, you just need to swap the vocabulary to speak it!
The other film I saw was “Quo vadis, Aida?” from Bosnia, about an interpreter working for UN during the Srebrenica massacre. Needless to say, watching it was a harrowing experience even though the director spared us any violent scenes but the tension and desperation was palpable. There are interesting scenes in which the interpreter has to translate from English into BCMS some statements/orders she’s opposed to and we can see her internal struggle when she’s forced to say out loud things she knows are wrong.
The other film I saw was “Quo vadis, Aida?” from Bosnia, about an interpreter working for UN during the Srebrenica massacre. Needless to say, watching it was a harrowing experience even though the director spared us any violent scenes but the tension and desperation was palpable. There are interesting scenes in which the interpreter has to translate from English into BCMS some statements/orders she’s opposed to and we can see her internal struggle when she’s forced to say out loud things she knows are wrong.
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Re: A Language Learner's Forum Film Club
On the 20th film director Bertrand Blier died, aged 85. Large list of classic films to his credit including: Les Valseuses, Calmos, Preparez vos mouchoirs. Buffet Froid, Merci la vie, Beau père (which I watched recently).
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