Donald Clarkeon subtitling in secret
Go to the British website for The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's gripping study of life in the old East Germany, and you will encounter the expected mass of insistent publicity material - a tense, pounding trailer, a list of awards won. But hang on. Nowhere on the site is there any hint that the film is in German.
To be fair, the trailer deserves grudging praise for the cunning way it gets across a notably chatty film's abundant merits without allowing any of its actors a word of dialogue. The contempt for the audience is, however, astonishing in its brazenness. It might, at the least, have clarified that the Academy Award boasted about on the poster was for best foreign-language film.
A charitable explanation is that the distributors believe that, once lured into the cinema, punters will get over their supposed antipathy to subtitles and savour this excellent film. A more realistic assessment concludes that, once the money is in the till, they couldn't care less whether the lumpen hordes enjoy it or not.
"So The Lives of Othersis actually a film in which giant octopuses consume Tokyo?" they might say. "So what? The trailer never actually said it concerned intrigue in the GDR. Take it up with your solicitor, mate."
This is not a new phenomenon. Throughout the 1990s, pseudo- arthouse Miramax Pictures was notorious for promoting glutinous European films concerning muddy-faced waifs without ever revealing that the infants in question spoke a romance language. Over the past few weeks, Mandarin-free trailers for Curse of the Golden Flower, an epic of the Tang Dynasty, have screened on TV. Last year, Pan's Labyrinthwas also given the we-no-speaky-foreign treatment.
The trailer for the latter featured particularly egregious examples of the film publicist's inclination towards creative disingenuousness. "In a dark time, when hope was bleak . . . " the cretinous voiceover began, before the screen filled up with fantastic images selected to give the false impression that Labyrinth was a grittier - though no less anglophonic - retread of Narnia.
Not surprisingly, such looseness with the thematic actualité can drive moviegoers to fits of righteous anger. Though most critics and fans properly adored Pan's Labyrinth, certain dungeons in the internet were alive with fantasy fans complaining that the publicity material was misleading. "What I got was 90% Spanish Civil War film and about 10% a fantasy film. I was in the mood for a fantasy film," a disgruntled visitor to Metacritic whined.
These adventures in dubious marketing have had one positive result. A craze has developed on the internet for cutting together footage to produce trailers in a genre markedly different to that of the original. The one selling The Shiningas an inspirational family film is something of a classic. The one in which The Break Up, a glum festival of nagging starring Jennifer Aniston, is presented as a light comedy is also enjoyably ludicrous.
Oh, hang on. That was a real trailer.
