European Film Festival

The European Film Festival is in town at the Cinema Nouveau in Rosebank (and in Cape Town, Pretoria and Durban.) Here was my chance to see many of the films and performances that had been nominated for Oscars at the 87th Academy Awards on a "big screen", including 2014's Best Foreign Film winner, Ida.

The theme of the festival is "A Woman's World" in tribute to the role of women in film, both behind and in front of the camera. The 12 films were selected for the way they reflected their female directors' unique insights and perspectives on film or the way their female actors translated on screen dramas of everyday life or extraordinary destinies in a very powerful and unique way. I could get behind that! Each film was from a different country in Europe and, except for the UK's My Brother the Devil, were delivered in a foreign language.

I watched my first subtitled foreign language film in college. Fellini's Amarcord. I went at the suggestion of my friend Mariana. Mariana was surely one of the worldliest friends I had made in my short and thus far largely sheltered life. And the perfect person to accompany me to see my first real foreign film. Already well-traveled, Mariana had grown up on a huge plantation in Ecuador where her father was the Country Minister for Cacao Export and her mother was from some deposed branch of European royalty. Mariana had boarded at a finishing school in Switzerland before she started college at the University of Florida which was at the time full of the offspring of wealthy South Americans, many of whom were my friends. So she led and I followed.

Mariana, and it seemed like everyone else in the cinema but me, laughed hysterically throughout the movie. Like laughing-until-you-cry laughter. But I didn't get it. I tried; I really did. I concentrated really hard. But the jokes were just as foreign to me as the language requiring subtitles.

It was baffling to me. I was half Italian and I grew up watching movies. My parents loved movies and so they took us often when we were little. When I outgrew my parents' needing to take me, I would go to the cinema as often as I could with my friends to see all the latest movies. I watched old movies on Channel 5 and 11 and The Million Dollar Movies on Channel 9. Before VCRs and On Demand, I would set my alarm for 3:00 am just to get up and watch Fred Astaire dance! I loved movies!

After my Fellini failure in Gainesville, I decided to sign up for a college film class as an elective. Along with the requisite classic English language films, we watched a lot of foreign language, mostly European, films. And with each one I watched and a little help from my professor, I started to unlock the mystery behind enjoying them until I became a true fanatic. It was an acquired taste for me, but I certainly acquired it in that film class.

And I slowly stopped feeling bad about my initial cluelessness too. Once, a few years later, I saw the Woody Allen film Manhattan for the first time - in San Francisco. My date - who hailed from Brooklyn - and I laughed hysterically from beginning to end. The room however was practically silent. It might as well have been a foreign language film. Same thing happened in Australia. On a lark, Vince and I bought tickets to see Wayne's World after a wave of homesickness hit us both as we walked past a cinema in Sydney one night after dinner. We laughed and laughed at Wayne and Garth and their very inside jokes until we started to feel self-conscious. It wasn't subtitled but the context and situations must not have translated very well to much of the Australian audience. Comedy separated by a common language.

I guess comedy is just tougher to translate even when it is presented in your native language. Just like tragedy, comedy is based on universal human experience. But some of the nuances and contexts of comedy are less culturally relatable making it therefore harder to share in the joke.

Ida was pretty tragic. Set in a bleak black and white Poland in the winter of Communist 1962, it was full of lies, murders, good jazz played badly, loneliness, betrayal, alcoholism, loveless sex, nicotine addiction, what looked like really bad food, a suicide, and a fall from grace. All pretty universally tragic; no nuances there.

Just a few years ago, Fellini's Amarcord was playing at the Film Forum in New York. I had seen all of Fellini's other films over the years and loved them at first sight but I hadn't seen Amarcord since that first disastrous night in Florida so many years ago. I decided to go by myself and see if it was as funny as Mariana had said it was. And yes, I laughed until I cried.