I Am in Love with Our Newfound Obsession with Language in Our Films
Okay, this is going to be a rant and a half.
My second favourite scene in Anatomie d’une Chute (or Anatomy of a Fall, as it’s known in English) is where Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) stands in court and says, “It’s too complicated. Can I switch the language, please?”
Until then, Sandra tries to speak in French to the French-speaking prosecutor. From this point forward though, she speaks in English and everyone else, including her son, speaks in French. We could say, oh, this is to remind us that she is an outsider in this land, but I think we would then be doing the film a grave injustice.
Despite speaking different languages, Sandra and everyone else understand each other. True, the French only understand her because they have a court-assigned translator. But we cannot deny that at all points they are communicating, no matter how inequitable the communication is.
There is politics to it: Who speaks a language that’s not their own? Who learns another’s language? What is a national language? What does the translation of a fight that happened in English mean in the context of Justice? The version of the story Sandra gives in English and the version the witnesses reveal in French merge into a new third version, and we are left wondering if any of these versions are even real.
Language barrier is a word I have grown up hearing, especially since I come from a country with so many languages. I believe though that language is just one mode of expression. Human beings communicate with or without it. I am not saying they communicate well — assuming that what one person says is exactly what the other person understands, even if they are speaking the same language, is foolish.
In an ironic meta way, though, we may have transcended Language barriers in this era of subtitles and world cinema, much like the characters in this iconic French film. Instead, we have graduated to something far more complex that recognises that the context in which human communication takes place and our ways of understanding are more layered and a greater barrier than our language structures.
We are obsessed with telling stories about language and its politics these days. The introduction of subtitling and dubbing along with these themes means that we are now in a realm where realities merge in the subtitles and the subtext of the film to create a new meaning that is more than just the sum of its parts.
Another movie that comes to mind when I think of Language barriers is Atrangi Re. If you haven’t watched the movie and you are, um, mentally ill like yours truly, I suggest you give this one a try.
When the Tamil-speaking Vishu (Dhanush) meets the Hindi-speaking Rinku (Sara Ali Khan), he switches to (a South Indian-accented) Hindi so she can understand him. But when he confesses that he is in love with her against his better judgment, he says it in Tamil.
I understand both Tamil and Hindi and the streaming service provides mediocre subtitles for those who don’t understand Tamil (or Hindi or neither).
But I couldn’t forget that Rinku doesn’t know Tamil. Yet, she understands him. For a second, we see her eyes grow wide and watch her stand frozen, surprised by his confession as if he had said it in a language she had been speaking forever.
In school, I was taught that Hindi is our national language and that it is our duty to learn it. It took me twenty years to realise that this is not true. India has 22 official languages and no national language. The fact that Vishu has to learn Hindi to survive in his college and that Rinku doesn’t have to think about learning Tamil is wrought in language politics.
But the scene breaks my heart because it captures how complex human expression is despite the existence of language. Vishu could very well have been saying gibberish and Rinku would still have understood.
They didn’t need a language in common to understand each other. Her Hindi, the one she has spoken all her life, is on standby while this man speaks in the language he grew up in, the only language he feels can carry the weight of what he has to say. He has learnt Hindi, sure, but the language is foreign to him, too light and malleable.
The fact that he does know Hindi and chooses not to speak in it, and she understands him nonetheless, creates a new language between them. A Tamil speaker would understand Vishu’s Tamil, of course. A Hindi audience member will read the subtitles and convince themselves they understand. The smarter ones will know that some things may have been lost in translation but that they have caught one version of the meaning.
But there is also a third meaning: the one understood by Rinku within the context of the film. The weight of seeing Vishu’s expressions in his mother tongue while he confesses to loving her adds meaning that would not exist if he had just spoken in Hindi or if she had just understood Tamil.
Do you see how more than one meaning exists in the same dialogue in the same movie? And how this meaning transcends the language it is expressed in?
Another of my favourites is Karan Johar’s Rocky aur Rani kii Prem Kahani. Rocky Randhawa (Ranveer Singh) is a flamboyant Punjabi munda who speaks grammatically unusual English with a confidence that could put Shashi Tharoor to shame. His English is quintessential to his community which has mixed Punjabi and English into their own language.
From introducing himself as “Rocky Randhawa this side” to calling Laundry “Londry,” this boy with a Punjabi accent quickly endears himself to us. But a lot of what he says might fly over the heads of a non-Indian audience, as it contains so much North Indian jargon and South Asian social media slang.
To get international and non-Hindi-speaking audiences closer to the true experience of Rocky’s language, the makers decided to subtitle his English phonetically. Even his Hindi is slang-ridden, and the streaming service worked hard to find equally slang-y English equivalents, even if they don’t make grammatical sense.
In a movie that discusses how privileged South Asians ridicule men like Rocky Randhawa, subtitling his dialogues without Anglicising or Sanskritizing his style was a powerful statement. Truth be told, I often laughed harder at the comedy in the subtitle than the actual Hindi dialogue. I believe that the Rocky aur Rani kii Prem Kahani in the subtitles is a separate movie from the one in the visuals. It is a version of the movie I want to keep revisiting.
It’s a great time to get back to Anatomie d’une Chute. My favourite scene is the fight between Sandra and Samuel. Right at the start, we see the prosecutor’s decision to translate their fight into French despite Sandra insisting she fought in English. In court, the transcription of the fight is projected on screens while the audio plays in English.
Oui, je suis violente is the one sentence that caught my eye before they shift into the past to show us their fight. I wondered why Sandra would say that. I imagined her saying it sadly, in response to Samuel accusing her of being violent. I understand a little French, but I am not fluent enough yet to immediately grasp how a fluent French speaker could say it.
I had obviously created a narrative in my head regarding her innocence and her womanhood. Women who are victims are not, by convention, allowed to be violent and loud. And I, like a fool, fell for this stereotype.
The audio played, and I was hooked, afraid to blink, in case I missed something. When Samuel says he meets her more than halfway in her English-speaking world, Sandra reminds him (and me, really) that English is not her first language either, that she’s the one meeting him three-quarters of the way by learning French.
By the time she yells, “Yes, I am violent,” I was so shaken that I almost laughed. I looked at the English subtitles on Amazon Prime — Yes, I am violent. And I thought, wait, this doesn’t mean the same thing as Je suis violente. The Sandra I had imagined saying this in French was not the same Sandra we heard yelling in English.
I now cannot stop thinking about the gap that is intrinsic to human communication, a gap that can’t be crossed, even if we understood each other via our expressions, even if we had subtitles, even if we understood all the languages in the world. Our ways of understanding, in and of itself, are a greater barrier than our language systems.
I do not own any of the images used in this essay. All images used here belong to Les Films Pelléas, Les Films de Pierre, Le Pacte (Anatomie d’une Chute), Dharma Productions, Viacom 18 Studios (Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani), Cape of Good Films, T-Series Films, Colour Yellow Productions, Disney+ Hostar (Atrangi Re), and all the other original creators.
I have used the images solely for commentary on and review of movies.
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