Why Foreign TV is the Unexpected Wonder We Didn’t Know Our Lockdown Needed
A lot of the top rated programs on Netflix at the moment have subtitles. I have never liked subtitles. I have also never questioned why I have never liked subtitles. After some recent soul searching I have come up with two reasons:
- They feel like a real effort. TV is meant to be for watching, if I had wanted to read I would have picked up a book instead.
- Only high brow arty cinema is filmed in foreign languages.
Setting aside the highly narrow-minded and problematic undertones in the fact that I think low brow, easily consumable films can only be created in the UK or America, I think these views have been developing since early childhood. My considerably more cultured mother was constantly trying to convince the family to watch foreign cinema. I’m sure the films she found are very good but in my mind they always either had the word ‘colour’ in the title or a colour in the title. They all seemed to be called things like ‘The Colour of Sadness’ or ‘Green grows the fairest cucumber’. They also all involved artistic sex scenes that were uncomfortable to watch with your parents, lingering shots of empty rooms which I’m sure are deeply complex metaphors that have gone completely over my head, and piano music accompanying sweeping Mediterranean vistas (ok, fine, this might only by Le Gloire de Mon Pere which is, I admit, actually quite a good film). But you get my point, subtitles are high brow.
My opinion on this was completely changed when I discovered The Hook Up Plan on Netflix. It is the most fantastically trashy TV I have watched in a long time. It’s about a perpetually single Parisian woman whose friends secretly pay a male escort to date her in order to boost her self-confidence. I mean, you can see what’s going to happen an absolute mile off but that is part of the joy of good trash.
The Hook Up Plan opened my eyes to a whole new world of TV watching. It turns out there are series in foreign languages that exist beyond Scandi-noir thrillers. At the moment I am working my way through the hilarious Call My Agent and the Danish political drama Borgen. From there I intend to move onto Spiral and Lupin. I am a fully-fledged subtitle convert.
Having thought I had completed Netflix my horizons have been broadened but it is not only the calibre of the TV that has changed my mind. I would argue that lockdown is the best possible time to start watching programmes with subtitles, irrelevant of the intellectual quality. Hell, maybe it’s time to see if there’s an Italian version of Love Island or a Russian First Dates (I’ve actually just googled it and am now very excited for the first series of Love Island Italy which comes out this summer. Alas, less luck with the Russian daters). The reason subtitles are so important at the moment is that they force us to focus our attention. Right now, the world is pretty shit. The news just keeps getting worse and we just keep getting more and more addicted to it. With our entire lives playing out within the four walls of our homes, there is no escaping the constant cycle of work, news, immediate family. Even when we do try and turn off by sitting down to watch telly we still have our phones glued to our hands, endlessly doom-scrolling.
Television is meant to be relaxing but we have all got into the habit of doing multiple things at once, meaning that we never fully switch off. We never allow ourselves to completely immerse ourselves in the program and focus all of our attention on it. Doing this allows you to actually relax, to briefly escape the worries and stresses of lockdown life. This is where subtitles come in. You can’t do anything else whilst you’re watching a program with subtitles. Check Instagram during an episode of Borgen and you’ve missed two politicians being fired, a national scandal being thwarted and several saucy affairs. Unless you speak fluent Danish you have to be reading as well as watching to understand what’s going on.
This is what we need in our lives right now though. The content is just as good, if not better than English programs and being forced to concentrate on it allows us to be fully tuned in, thereby turning off the psychological cycle of R numbers, laundry and Zoom meetings. For forty minutes we can be in Paris or Jerusalem or Moscow. We can let our imaginations fire up and give us the escape we all need so desperately. We might not be able to actually smell that baguette or taste the vodka but it’s the closest we can get. And quite frankly, right now, a forty minute holiday is about the best we can do.
