Language is the last frontier for Hollywood film-makers

“RED SPARROW”, a new thriller featuring Jennifer Lawrence as a Russian spy, is not entirely a paint-by-numbers film. Its hero is a woman. A few of its twists are genuinely surprising. But in one way, it is Hollywood to the core. Its Russian characters display their Russianness by speaking accented English to each other. Ms Lawrence hardly bothers with anything much beyond a general eastern European; only the occasional throaty l sounds at all Russian. And just one line of real dialogue is in Russian: another spy complains about a drunken American woman he and Ms Lawrence’s character are cultivating, saying that if he has to spend another minute with her he will shoot her in the face. The accents might give the viewer the same feeling.

Hollywood’s attention to the detail of foreign settings, from clothing to sets, has advanced beyond the old lazy stereotypes of years past. But in things linguistic, the situation is patchy. “Red Sparrow” hardly improves on “The Hunt for Red October”, released in 1990, in which Sean Connery mumbles a few lines in Russian, then speaks with a modest, generically foreign twinge to his Scottish burr.

The other classic option seems to be to give a British accent to every character in a foreign clime—especially the villains—whether the locale is ancient Rome or the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros in “Game of Thrones”. It is a rare movie in which an actor successfully masters not only a foreign accent, but foreign-language dialogue. The impressively multilingual Viggo Mortensen puts Ms Lawrence and Mr Connery to shame with his fluid Russian in “Eastern Promises” (2007).

A few recent films have tried to make the creative difficulty of a foreign-language setting a feature rather than a bug. One example is “Black Panther”. For most of the movie, African-American actors speak English with a kind of pan-African accent, which does not, in fact, exist; Africa is home to around 2,000 languages. But the film-makers also took the unusual step of making a real language—Xhosa, which was Nelson Mandela’s mother tongue—stand in for the fictional “Wakandan”. Ignoring the potential charge of cultural appropriation—borrowing a real-world culture for an American popcorn film—the use of Xhosa did at least give a suitably foreign flair to the setting. Sadly, it did little more than that; its scattered use and the random switches to English did nothing to advance the plot or flesh out the characters.

The award for most audacious use of language in a recent film has to go to “Arrival”, in which aliens land on Earth and stay put in their ships without explanation. A linguist is sent to discern their intentions; she deciphers their visual language in scenes that rely on the expertise of actual working linguists, many of whom were pleased to see some of their ideas make it to the big screen. The film’s crux draws on a theory of language and the mind—that learning a new language “rewires” the brain and its processes—taking that premise to such an extreme that the viewer is in no doubt about being in a land of science fiction. Still, the story took the question of language seriously.

Why can’t more film-makers simply work language into their plot in a realistic way that will let viewers recognise the world they live in? “Inglourious Basterds” (2009) is set in second-world-war Germany and France. Several multilingual characters, including the marvellous Christoph Waltz, alternate languages in the service of crucial plot points. Michael Fassbender speaks fluent German (his real-life father is German). His character, an English spy in Germany, makes a fatal mistake not with his spoken German but with a hand gesture that crucially differs between the two countries. All through the film, the viewer has to ask why the characters are choosing the language they employ at any given time. It is as though language is a character itself.

Many non-American films integrate language-switching much more naturally, as the process is a routine part of many people’s daily lives. It seems that Hollywood has simply not developed the confidence that its viewers are willing to tolerate such disjunctures. The assumption is that they want foreign climes, but familiar faces and sounds. Yet successes such as “Inglourious Basterds” and “Arrival” prove that Anglophone viewers aren’t necessarily turned off by subtitles if there is a reason for them. Hollywood is leading more films with non-white actors and women. Why not put the world’s languages in the spotlight too?