If “Scent of a Woman” sounds like a sexist title for a film, blame it on the Italians. The new Al Pacino picture was “inspired by” the 1975 Italian film “Profumo Di Donna.” In fact, the partial remake is the first in a wave of such films that will soon to engulf the nation’s theaters.
Hollywood is playing the remake game, gambling that foreign-language art house hits will translate into English-language box-office successes. From “La Femme Nikita” to “Cinema Paradiso,” studio executives are taking a hard look at overseas triumphs, trying to decide if their linguistic and cultural nuances can be converted into Americanese.
“There is a frantic search for material in this business,” says Tony Safford of Miramax Films, the distributor of “Cinema Paradiso” and other foreign-language hits. “The major studios can afford to cast their net very wide-they can look at plays, at books, and, looking at a broad range of source material, they realize they can go to foreign-language films as a potential remake.”
Hollywood has always looked overseas for inspiration. Authors like Victor Hugo (“Les Miserables”) and Leo Tolstoy (“War and Peace”) have long been Tinseltown favorites, and the industry has been borrowing stars, directors, screenwriters and plotlines from continental films since the silent era.
But filmland has had to pick and choose its remakes with care, because a good storyline is no guarantee of crossover success. Plots, ideas and themes may be so specific to a certain culture, they do not translate easily. Comedies may contain references unintelligible to outsiders; romances may involve moral attitudes repugnant to foreign audiences. Even the language of cinema itself differs from culture to culture-many European films, for example, tend to be more deliberately paced than American pictures, have darker personal visions, and require an audience to think, rather than react.
All this helps explain why retreads of plot and character-driven French films (“Three Men and A Baby,” “Cousins,” “Paradise” ) have been popping up with regularity over the past decade. With their knockabout humor and culturally neutral lead characters, they have proven easily adaptable to an American context.
The new boomlet in Americanization is both a continuation of this Francophile movement, and a divergence-several projects set for remake are from previously untapped national and genre sources. Films that have been finished or are in various stages of development and production are versions of:
– “Scent of a Woman,” based on a 1975 Italian film of the same name, which opened in December in Chicago from Universal. The film stars Al Pacino and is directed by Martin Brest (“Beverly Hills Cop”).
– “La Femme Nikita” is called “The Specialist” in its American version. The 1991 French-language hit, about a vicious female punk who is trained by a shadowy government organization to be a sophisticated professional killer, has been remade by Warner Bros. The film stars Bridget Fonda and Gabriel Byrne, and is expected to be released in spring.
– “The Return of Martin Guerre” is the 1982 French hit about a peasant who is so changed after a long separation from his family that he is suspected of being an imposter. The Warner Bros. reworking is called “Sommersby,” and features a Civil War setting. Due for release Feb. 5, the picture stars Richard Gere, Jodie Foster and James Earl Jones.
– “The Vanishing,” a 1988 French/Dutch film about a man whose search for his disappeared girlfriend leads to a psychotic killer, has been remade by 20th Century-Fox. The film’s original director, George Sluizer, helmed the American version, which stars Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland. Due for release Feb. 5.
– “Cinema Paradiso,” the Oscar-winning Italian film, and “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down,” the sexy Spanish comedy by Pedro Almodovar, are in development at Warner’s.
– “Toto Les Heroes,” the Belgian fantasy/comedy, is in development at Paramount.
– The French drama “Betty Blue” is being developed by its original director Jean-Jacques Beineix and Amy Heckerling, director of “Look Who’s Talking,” is planning an American version of the 1980 French film “Mon Oncle d’Amerique.”
– “The Killer,” based on the over-the-top Hong Kong genre flick, is in development at Tri-Star.
Tony Safford of Miramax thinks this lust for foreign remakes has a lot to do with a sense of cost-consciousness in Hollywood-successful foreign films can be adapted for less money than an original screenplay, and have already proven their worth with audiences. He also feels most foreign remakes come from two distinct categories: genre films like “The Seven Samurai” (see sidebar), with “mythological plot points” that can be remade as Westerns, motorcyle movies, even science fiction films; and character-driven comedies like “Three Men and A Baby,” which he refers to as “situation comedies that can travel.”
New York Observer film critic Andrew Sarris agrees that action films and what he calls “French boulevard comedy” have long been remake favorites. But he adds that just because a film has the universality of genre-sci fi, cop flicks, etc.-does not guarantee successful translation.
“I think what’s underestimated is casting,” he says, “which is more important in many cases than plot or genre. For instance, I don’t think Bridget Fonda is going to be as spectacular (in the “Femme Nikita” remake) as Anne Parillaud (the newcomer who starred in the French version). Fonda already has a track record, and it’s easier to accept that outlandish part with a relatively unknown actress than someone who is obviously acting it.”
Despite Sarris’s opinion, the genre-like “Femme Nikita,” an action film featuring a sexy killer/heroine, is the perfect example of a foreign picture that is a breeze to convert to American. “I don’t think it’s really French in spirit,” says Robert Getchell, who wrote the screenplay for the American version. “There’s a certain emotional coolness which is French, but the spirit of the movie is American.”
Not that “Femme Nikita” didn’t undergo its share of changes. Getchell notes that because the last third of the original seemed confusing, and featured an open-ended finale, he and Warner’s decided to “cut the last 40 pages of the script, and graft onto it a really seamless story (he won’t reveal the new ending).”
“The Specialist” also gives more information about the lead character, whose background was barely hinted at in the original. “The female lead (in the original) was to a degree opaque,” says Getchell. “An American audience demands clarity. I think they would feel unsatisfied that there weren’t questions answered about the lead.”
That search for clarity is a key element in the conversion process. Many European films demand a certain intellectual rigor from the audience, by refusing to spell everything out. American audiences are used to straightforward, some would say simple-mindedly direct, story-telling. Nowhere is this cultural clash more evident than in the remake of “The Vanishing.”
The original, released in this country to critical acclaim, is almost Wagnerian in its brooding nature. While on vacation, a man’s girlfriend disappears from a rest stop. Over the next three years, he becomes obsessed with finding her.
He ultimately tracks down the abductor, a psychotic who leads a normal public life. The abductor plays a psychological cat-and-mouse game with the boyfriend, finally promising to show him what happened to the girl. The film ends on an extremely downbeat note.
George Sluizer, director of both film versions, says the American version has been stripped almost totally of its reflective quality, and is not as dark as the European one.
“It’s too ethereal,” he says, “it might not mean enough for an American audience. People are used to formats. I think that asks too much headwork of an audience, particularly if that audience is not used to thinking.”
Sluizer adds that other liberties have been taken with the Americanized film. Sexual situations have been toned down because, he says, “there are more taboos” in Stateside pictures. A secondary character has had her role expanded and changed. Instead of being an educated professional, she is now a waitress, someone, says Sluizer, “you can relate to more than an educated person.”
But the biggest change comes at the end, and it represents the difference between the expectations of foreign and domestic audiences. In the original version, the young man dies in a bizarre manner, and his killer goes unpunished. The last shot of the film shows the killer holding a family picnic directly over the hidden grave of his victim.
Could American audiences, accustomed to retribution in their films, stand for such an ending? Is the killer punished in the new version?
“Obviously,” says Sluizer. “It’s an American movie.”
