Bait and switch

At a screening of The Triplets of Belleville last night, two previews made me feel surprised and grateful. Each was for a foreign language film: Monsieur Ibrahim, in French (duh), and Good Bye Lenin!, in German. Good Bye Lenin! I've been curious about for some time, and I'm glad it's coming to Madison; Monsieur Ibrahim, starring Omar Sharif, looks OK, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it. Mostly it reminded me of the time I bummed a smoke off a Korean chum in graduate school and noticed it had on it a tiny picture of Sharif.

But what struck me about these previews is that they were subtitled. Whole, long stretches of dialog from both films appeared, with titles. I mention this because I have a pet peeve about many trailers for foreign films: watching them, you might suspect the films they promote have no dialog at all. These trailers explain the plot in an English voiceover ("In a world...where love triumphs"), and if you hear the actors' voices at all, they are exclusively: laughing, crying, speaking a character's name ("Am�lie!"), or saying one of the handful of foreign words everybody knows ("Bonjour!"). It's as though the trailers' producers hope to trick us into believing the movies are not, in fact, furn.