Sunday – lunch in Clapham at Heather M’s place, Claudia A accompanying me. Then straight to Angel to see ‘The Reader’ at the Vue cinema, with Shanthi S.
Once it becomes clear that the film is entirely made up of English actors playing German characters, who speak to each other in English – but with a German accent, I just can’t get on with it.
With me, it’s purely the choice of accent that grates, rather than the usage of English. Had Kate Winslet and co spoke in BBC RP – that so-called ‘non-accent English’ – which is really Southern English-posh (but not too posh), I’d have no problem. RP is the convention I’m used to: RP is The British Drama Accent. If you choose convention, you have to follow through with it. But English with a German accent – to represent Germans speaking to other Germans – seems an attempt to have one’s strudel and eat it.
On top of which, the lines they speak sound like German In Translation – stilted, stagey, and too ominously aware of the gravity of the subject matter. It’s a tale connected to the Holocaust, so one hardly expects a bundle of laughs. But just a tiny twist more realism is needed – a little roughening up, a little less polish.
I think of ‘Conspiracy’, the TV movie where Kenneth Branagh and others play various top Nazis at a secret conference, deciding upon the Final Solution. They use BBC RP with a touch of the vernacular and everyday. They chat, in other words. As they would have.
At one point a character says, ‘Do the Jews believe in hell?’ and Branagh replies, ‘They do now. We provide it.’ He tosses this chilling line out casually, lightly, with the fake-matey smirk of an unloved office manager. And it works brilliantly. People who made history didn’t declaim in a ‘Making History’ tone, not when they were just speaking to each other behind closed doors.
Bruno Ganz pops up in ‘The Reader’ too, recalling ‘Downfall’, the German film where he played Hitler. Again, another WW2 film where people in conversation actually converse rather than declaim.
The other convention that irks me is the question of characters aging. When we first see her in the 1950s, Ms Winslet – playing a thirtysomething – frolics with a teenage boy. Then it moves to the 60s, where he’s in his twenties, and she’s in her forties. Cue slight aging make-up for Kate, and college clothes for the young man. Come the 1970s and 1980s, she gets the full old lady make-up, while the young man… turns into Ralph Fiennes.
Again, it’s the inconsistency of dramatic convention that risks dividing the audience into those who don’t see these things as distractions, and those who can’t think of anything else.
Why didn’t they age the young male actor as well? Or replace Ms W with an older actress?
I’ve seen ‘Iris’. I know that if you leave Kate Winslet alone long enough, she turns into Judi Dench.
Tags: getting annoyed with the language of cinema, the reader
