No film recommendation this week, but a moan about something that really gets on my nerves. I have just watched Child 44 (2015), a film based, very loosely, on the apprehension of Andrei Chikatila, a serial killer in Russia in the 1970s and 80s.
It’s not a good film. Citizen X (1995), which focuses more closely on the events of the time, is better. However, what I want to comment on is the use inChild 44 of heavily accented English, a practice which, by now, should have been discontinued.
It sounds stupid to have an actor like Tom Hardy playing a Russian character speaking English with a bastardised “Anglo-Russki” voice, sometimes so guttural that you can’t make out what he is saying. Rather like a Russian version of Allo Allo!
It doesn’t have to be like this. The filmmakers can use subtitles or have the actors speak unaccented English (however that term might be interpreted). (The other alternative would be dubbing, but that has severe drawbacks). In Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990) the Lakota Native Americans speak their own language with English subtitles, and that did no harm to its popularity or its Oscar award for Best Picture. There are many other examples. “It ees time to stope zis stipeed praktish, nyet?”
• Dances with Wolves is available on DVD, but not streaming.
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