A language learners’ forum

Le Baron wrote:Relevant to this thread... The passing of Alain Delon, at 88. A giant of French cinema.

Do you have a favourite Alain Delon film you'd recommend?

DaveAgain wrote:

Le Baron wrote:Relevant to this thread... The passing of Alain Delon, at 88. A giant of French cinema.

Do you have a favourite Alain Delon film you'd recommend?

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 (?)

Le Baron wrote:The one where he's an ex soldier from the Algerian war (?)

L'insoumis?

DaveAgain wrote:

Le Baron wrote:The one where he's an ex soldier from the Algerian war (?)

L'insoumis?

Yes, that's it. I just checked Wikipedia.

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.