Polanski movie doing pretty well in France

I don't know what this means or to whom this is some kind of victory, but Roman Polanski's movie, An Officer and a Spy, is doing pretty well in France in spite of the accusation that Polanski raped an 18-year-old actress in France in 1975. The gross is between $8.7 and $11 million. They've sold

I don't know how big the French market is or how most French movies do there. I don't know if doing well in France is enough. Maybe the French are more open-minded, or maybe there's not much else to watch, or maybe movies in general don't perform especially well there.

From Variety:

Ticket sales for “An Officer and a Spy” grew over the weekend. Eric Marti, general manager for Comscore France, said the uptick was a sign that the film is enjoying strong word-of-mouth and will likely continue to perform well in the weeks to come.

“‘An Officer and a Spy’ has enough legs to sell between 1.2 million to 1.5 million admissions (and gross between $8.7 million to $11 million) in France, slightly more than Polanski’s 2010 film ‘The Ghost Writer,'” Comscore said.

But Marti said the film would have done substantially better without the controversy surrounding Polanski, whom former actor Valentine Monnier recently accused of raping her in 1975, when she was 18.

Polanski's Pirates was his biggest hit in France selling two million tickets. It was in English like a lot of Polanski movies, but the French are open to dubbing.

I just saw a dubbed movie on Netflix. I don't know what it was and I didn't watch it all. But I'm tired of reading subtitles. I want to watch movies on TV like it's TV, so you can watch it while sitting on the computer, reading a magazine, doing some housework or whatever else people do with the TV on. I don't want to have to sit there with my eyes glued to the set so I don't miss what's going on. The dubbed version was fine.

Now, there was Luc Moullet's New Wave French western A Girl is a Gun. Perhaps getting into the spirit of bad dubbing, Jean-Pierre Leaud's dialogue was dubbed in a deep voice that was nothing like his. And I've seen dubbed foreign films where thirteen-year-old boys sound like middle-aged cigarette smoking alcoholics. But this thing I saw, whatever it was, was great. I wasn't used to seeing stuff dubbed so it took me a second to realize it was even through they weren't that careful matching up the syllables. Which is good.

I saw this old Italian crime movie. It was awful. But judging from the opening credits, one of the three stars was an American and was presumably speaking English, so I watched their mouths trying to tell which one was English dubbed in English, and I couldn't tell. The dubbing was so well done it could have been any of them.

Which is why I didn't trust it. I want them to translate for accuracy, not to get the syllables to match.

Back in the days before video, there were books on film making which argued passionately for dubbing. You could change lines, you could hire actors for looks and have real actors dub their voices, you could use any camera even if it wasn't normally suited for live sound, you don't have to worry about background noise and the director could talk to the actors while they film the scene.

And, really, with digital video, you'd still have those advantages and do-it-yourself dubbing would be easier now than in the old days when you had to figure out how to dub dialog without the projector noise.