"The idea of speaking English with a Czech accent without actually speaking Czech meant it wasn't coming from anywhere – I knew that that kernel of truth that I need to have somewhere in a role would be missing." "It was something to do with language," he said of his concerns. Come on – you know Daniel Day-Lewis would do it.ĭay-Lewis himself recently expressed doubts about his own work in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which he played a Czech brain surgeon who speaks in English. (The non-Mandarin-speaking James Schamus was a co-writer on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: his writing was simply translated into Mandarin.) And why not stipulate that Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes and any other English cast members should learn German for the film? In an industry where actors routinely jeopardise their health by piling on or shedding vast amounts of weight, it's not much to ask someone to go to sleep each night with Learn German the Easy Way on their iPod. Hare's screenplay could have been translated with no great difficulty into German. The problem could have been easily rectified. Why not just show the lad popping into Waterstone's on the way home? Would an anachronism be any worse than a transparent falsehood? There's even a library scene in which all the books on the shelves are clearly printed in English. The written word is crucial to the film's story and yet, in this form at least, it is fake. The German boy, who converses exclusively in English, reads to his English-speaking German lover after sex. This would not be especially relevant were The Reader not partly about, well, reading. Or rather, it was adapted in English by David Hare from Bernhard Schlink's novel, which was written in German. The script was adapted by David Hare from Bernhard Schlink's novel about the passionate and mysterious affair between a teenage boy and an older, secretive woman in postwar Berlin. (Suspend your disbelief that high and you'll pull a muscle.)īut that is not the film's insurmountable problem. There are many things wrong with this film, not least the supposedly pivotal scene that relies for its power on the viewer believing that Kate Winslet is 20 years older than Ralph Fiennes just because she's wearing unconvincing little-old-lady makeup. A case in point is The Reader, which opens next month. Sometimes, though, the use of English as the default language of the movies doesn't sit right.
Cast of the reader movie#
Most of the time it's one of those dumb movie things we put up with, like unsmearable lipstick, or hairdos that never look like they've been pulled through a hedge backwards, even when they've just been pulled through a hedge backwards. If a UK or US-financed picture hopes to attract major stars and major box office, it will just have to be made in English, wherever it happens to be set, and realism be damned. Only in exceptional cases is the former not accompanied by the latter. There are only two international languages in the film industry – money is one, English the other.
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