COMPLICATIONS OF DUBBING
Getting the accent right is key
One of the unheralded cultural battles Quebec wages with the American film studios and their distribution networks involves dubbing.
English speakers are generally unfamiliar with dubbed entertainment material, essentially movies that have been lipsynched into various languages.
Being the benefactors of cultural imperialism, we enjoy the privilege of our language and consume mostly English-language entertainment. Should we find ourselves in front of a dub, we end up spending much of our time expressing dismay over the fact that the lips don’t seem to be in sync with the words.
From time to time, we watch things that are subtitled, but generally we are not all that happy about it. As my nephew once said, “I don’t go to the movies to read.”
On the other hand, non-English-speaking cultures everywhere else in the world watch dubbed movies and embrace them.
In Italy the same actor, Oreste Lionello, voiced Woody Allen over and over again until he became Allen in the ears of Italian audiences. When Lionello died in 2009, he was a star.
Dubbing a feature-length movie is expensive. It costs anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000, should you want to do it right, which means taking more time. And it is easy enough to get it wrong, including not getting the accent right.
Take Spanish dubbing, for example. You might think Spanish dubbing would be done in Spain and then sold all over the Spanish-speaking world. Wrong. People in Spain like their accent but nobody in Latin American does. The Spanish lispy “eth” added on as almost another syllable is unpleasant, even laughable, to most Latinos.
The country with the most neutral and clearest Spanish accent? Mexico.
Imagine, then, what dubbing represents for Quebec and les cousins, the French.
It is a war really, new and old France pitted against each other in a battle of accents. The stakes: lots of American dollars. French dubs have played here forever. Needless to say films dubbed into French in Quebec are not distributed in France. It’s not exactly your ideal free-trade situation.
Now the Union des artistes, which represents Quebec actors, wants a bigger piece of that American pie. That would mean creating separate dubs, one for Quebec and another for France, doubling the costs, something American studios are not inclined toward.
While I agree that more of this work should be done here in Quebec, from personal experience I know that the dubbing issue is more complicated than that.
When I produced the Englishlanguage movie The Trotsky, which was written and directed by my son Jacob, we were thrilled that the distributor decided to dub it into French rather than use subtitles. Dubbed movies have a chance of commercial success. Subtitled ones go directly into the art-film pile where they suffer a slow death commercially.
I was not completely ready for the next question: what accent do you want it dubbed with? Hello? Québécois or “Français international”?
It seemed like a no-brainer. We had a slew of great Québécois actors in the movie and we certainly weren’t going to ask them to fake a mid-Atlantic French accent. Québécois, we replied. The distributor was dubious but ready to let us have our way. Some of the actors we hired to dub the English-speaking actors also expressed their doubts about our decision. Their argument was that Quebec audiences don’t like hearing the Québécois accent in a dubbed movie. Comment? We persisted. The film opened. During our first major interview in the French media with Christiane Charette on Radio-Canada, she got a text from a listener: “Why did you dub it with a Québécois accent?” It would not be the last time that discussion arose.
The Union des artistes awareness campaign known as “Doublé au Québec” started at the end of April. Its goal is to get audiences to support films and TV shows that have been dubbed here.
Which accent they plan on using in these dubs might well be the subject of many future discussions. Nobody said it was easy living with our contradictions.