Friday, December 06, 2013

Lingua fracas in Nayakan and Inglourious Basterds: movie characters confounded by language


One of last year's most popular feel-good films was Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish, with Sridevi as a diffident, middle-aged woman visiting America and barely knowing how to get by, given her limited knowledge of English. On arriving in New York, she is beset – both on the streets and in her sister’s house – by words spoken in incomprehensible accents, and generally disoriented by the pace of life around her. At one point the film’s music track expresses her state of mind through a melange of sounds coming at her from all directions; meanwhile the title song gently combines English with Hindi in ways that are familiar to most middle-class Indians. (“Badlaa nazaraa yun yun yun / Saara ka saara new new new.”)

I thought about the hegemony of language again recently while watching scenes in two very different films, scenes that showed how fluency or lack of fluency in a language can affect our perceptions of people: the powerful can seem like underdogs, good guys may appear ridiculous, bad guys almost admirable. The first was Mani Rathnam’s 1987 classic Nayakan, fuelled by Kamal Haasan’s stunning performance as Velu Nayakan, who becomes an underworld don and a godfather to the South Indian community in Bombay. I had a strange moment watching Nayakan: having become immersed in the story, and taken its “Tamil-ness” for granted (this was a clearly South Indian film, I had to read subtitles to understand it), I temporarily forgot that the setting was Bombay, and that people outside Velu’s immediate, enclosed environment speak in Hindi or Marathi.

This came home in a scene where Velu – already a well-respected don – has to interact with dons from other parts of the city. Suddenly traces of uncertainty, wariness, even vulnerability, appear on his face as he tries to size up these potential rivals or enemies, whose speech he can’t easily follow. As viewers, we have been thinking of Velu as a larger-than-life figure, firmly in control of his fiefdom, but now we see him in more human terms. There is also something moving about the suggestion that Velu, despite spending almost his entire life in Bombay, never properly learns the city’s majority languages – this gives his situation a nuance that differentiates it from the story of the young Vito Corleone in Little Italy in The Godfather Part II (a film that Nayakan has clear links with), slowly picking up English as he makes his way in the world, so that the transition from the Italian-speaking Vito (played by Robert de Niro) to the English-mumbling patriarch (Marlon Brando) seems wholly natural. Nayakan, on the other hand, gets much of its edge from Velu’s immutable foreignness. No wonder Mani Rathnam expressed dissatisfaction (in one of his interviews with Baradwaj Rangan) with the Hindi remake of the film, Feroz Khan’s Dayavan: the remake was about a Mumbaikar in Mumbai, where he is culturally and linguistically at home, which meant an important subtext about alienation was absent.

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The other scene is a comic one, but provides food for thought too. It is from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a wish-fulfilling alternate history in which Nazi hunters save the day during World War II. The villain here is Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz: he is terrifyingly smooth, sharp... and a polyglot, which gives him an edge over the good guys, the “Basterds” led by Aldo (Brad Pitt), all of whom are barely fluent in one language, English (more accurately American, spoken in a distinct Southern drawl). One of the film’s funniest scenes has Aldo and team disguised as Italians at a party, while Landa – well aware that they are imposters – toys with them like a cat slowly prying open a box of inauthentic but tasty pasta. (Earlier, when we heard Brad Pitt say “I can speak some Aye-talian” - in response to his German informer contemptuously asking if they know any language other than English - we could tell these boys would soon be treading on thin ice. And so it comes to pass.)

It’s an excellent comic premise, one that combines tension with laughs, and also invites the viewer to consider his own responses to the characters. Here are Aldo and company trying to save the world by infiltrating the dens of the Nazi top brass, and yet they barely understand a word of German. We are supposed to be rooting for them, but they look and behave like hicks – the Three Stooges handed a World War and unsure what to do with it – confirming every stereotype of the insular, ignorant American; in comparison the nasty Landa seems like a higher, more cultured species. We cringe when Aldo says “Bonjourno”, enunciating the word much too deliberately. Then we chuckle when Landa (who seems able to toss off any language as if he were born speaking it) turns out to be a fluent Italian speaker too, and when he deferentially asks the “Italians” if his pronunciation is right. (“Si si, correcto,” Aldo replies, before grunting “Arrividerci” - or "A river derchy" - in a ludicrously fake accent.)

Almost in spite of their tomfoolery here, the good guys do eventually get the job done. But when Aldo gets the better of Landa in the film’s last scene, he does it not by winning a verbal duel but by using a knife to carve an incriminating swastika on his adversary’s forehead. The caveman comes out on top because he knows how to use crude tools – and speech be damned.

[Did a version of this for Business Standard. An earlier post here on Tarantino's Django Unchained, in which Christoph Waltz plays another character who uses language so fluidly that everyone around him looks like they've just stumbled in from the Paleolithic]

18 comments:

  1. I didnt realize how funny that scene was because the story kind of kept me on the edge (will they or wont they?).

    Try out the Tropical thunder scene, where Robert Downey Jr. tries to speak some language (Vietnamese?) and occasionally slips in english.

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  2. Ah yes, I remember that scene - saw the film a while back though...

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  3. Great post!
    Reminded me of another scene from Godfather I - Michael meeting with Solazzo. According to an Italian friend, Solazzo is speaking not standard Italian but Sicilian dialect which can be difficult even for Italians. No wonder Michael is completely lost and when he starts speaking he fumbles a couple of words and then starts speaking in English - perhaps to the chagrin of Solazzo who wanted to keep it private from McCluskey.

    Love the blog btw, did not get around to comment till now. :)

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  4. Raj: thanks. And yes, that's a good example of a scene where a viewer from another culture might not get the subtext - perhaps comparable to a non-Indian watching the Nayakan scene of the dons meeting and not fully grasping the many tensions underlying it.

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  5. Dayavan wasn't about a 'Mumbaikar in Mumbai'. Faithful to the original, this one also showed a Tamil boy named Shakthi Velu who flees to Bombay. The boy is shown speaking Tamil. It's only later when he grows up (as Vinod Khanna) that he mouths Hindi in a fake accent.

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  6. Amby: my mistake - only saw the film as a child, and must have misunderstood Mani Rathnam's remarks about it. His point then must have been a more complex one about the character adopting the more widely spoken language in the city, and hence not being as much of an outsider as in Nayakan.

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  7. Very "bloggy"...surprised that this got published in a newspaper.

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  8. Very "trolly" ... surprised that this comment got published on a blog.

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  9. According to an Italian friend, Solazzo is speaking not standard Italian but Sicilian dialect which can be difficult even for Italians. No wonder Michael is completely lost and when he starts speaking he fumbles a couple of words and then starts speaking in English - perhaps to the chagrin of Solazzo who wanted to keep it private from McCluskey

    Weren't the Corleones Sicilians by origin? So Michael's mother tongue would've been English and Sicilian, not standard Italian.

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  10. Weren't the Corleones Sicilians by origin? So Michael's mother tongue would've been English and Sicilian, not standard Italian.

    Good point. Perhaps what De Niro speaks in Godfather II would be that or closer to that. So the part "No wonder Michael is completely lost" in my earlier reply is not required because for some reason, Micheal does not seem to have absorbed the language. When he tries to speak, it's a rather clumsy standard Italian. Is that Pacino's shortcoming disguised by Coppola because he doesn't speak Italian? I don't remember what happens in the book.


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  11. for some reason, Micheal does not seem to have absorbed the language. When he tries to speak, it's a rather clumsy standard Italian. Is that Pacino's shortcoming disguised by Coppola because he doesn't speak Italian?

    The reason is obvious. Michael Corleone is a second generation American. So he is naturally not expected to be fluent in either Sicilian or standard Italian. Coincidentally even Al Pacino is a 3rd generation American. So one doesn't expect Pacino the actor to be fluent in Sicilian either.

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  12. There appears to be a contradiction here.

    "So Michael's mother tongue would've been English and Sicilian, not standard Italian."

    "Michael Corleone is a second generation American. So he is naturally not expected to be fluent in either Sicilian or standard Italian."

    Either you accept that Michael should at least be able to converse in Sicilian or you accept that he should not be. You can't argue one way at one time and another way next time.

    In any case, I think what matters more is how Puzo conceived it and how Coppola, if at all, changed it.


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  13. Either you accept that Michael should at least be able to converse in Sicilian or you accept that he should not be. You can't argue one way at one time and another way next time.

    Raj: There is no contradiction. My mother tongue is Tamil. But having been brought up in Bangalore and now living in Delhi for several years, my Tamil fluency is rather limited. I cannot read/write the language. Nevertheless it still remains the language I speak at home.

    Yes, Michael may be having trouble understanding Solozzo's Sicilian. But not because it is not "standard Italian" as you initially mentioned. But because he is an American through and through who speaks broken Sicilian probably only with his aged mother!

    By the way I have no idea if the language spoken by Pacino in the film is standard Italian or the Sicilian dialect. I presume it is broken Sicilian given his Sicilian background.

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  14. But because he is an American through and through who speaks broken Sicilian probably only with his aged mother!
    In that case, he should be able to speak it with Solazzo as well. When you say it's mother tongue, that means you should be able to speak in it - as you do in Tamil.


    I speak Italian, by the way, and there is no sign of Sicilian dialect in Michael's heavily accented Italian.

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  15. Nice theme, Jai. Something that I miss in watching subtitled movies are these subtleties in language, especially in Italian movies where there are such wide regional variations. I am glad I am fluent in 1.5 languages other than English to appreciate it where I see it.

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  16. In that case, he should be able to speak it with Solazzo as well. When you say it's mother tongue, that means you should be able to speak in it - as you do in Tamil.

    It doesn't always work that way. Maybe the Sicilian spoken in NY by deracinated Sicilian-Americans is vastly different from the Sicilian spoken back in Italy.

    Eg: The Tamil I speak at home is highly sanskritized and I am often discomfited when someone talks to me in pure Tamil devoid of Sanskrit root words. Though I am perfectly comfortable speaking sanskritized tamil at home

    I speak Italian, by the way, and there is no sign of Sicilian dialect in Michael's heavily accented Italian.

    Okay. Then you're the content expert here :)

    Looks like Coppola made a mistake asking Pacino to speak standard Italian instead of Sicilian. Oh maybe it's because most Italians in NY ghettoes are non-Sicilians. So Michael would've grown up speaking better Italian than Sicilian!

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  17. Reminds me of these linguistic moments discovered recently in Balachander's Punnagai Mannan. We find out that Revathy is Sinhalese only when she exclaims in Sinhala when she falls. Later, she sends a message to Kamal Hassan, her dance teacher, in Sinhala. He thinks it is a love-message, and is at once irritated and intrigued by it. He has to ask another student, a Sri Lankan Tamil, what it is, without letting him know that it is Revathy who sent the message. In the end, we find it is just "Happy new year!"

    Later in the movie, we see Revathy scribbling something in Sinhala on the dust on Kamal's car. Again, irritatedly, he asks her what it is. She says, almost sheepishly, "Maruti."

    There's also a spectacular scene where Kamal gives it back to her father in English, after he subtly refuses to talk to anyone in Tamil.

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