Zero Zero Sette

 This week feeling the need for some mindless entertainment we headed to the cinema.  The new James bond adventure was our chosen film.  We would have to watch the film dubbed into Italian given that being such a small place Treviso doesn’t have an audience for English language films.  There is one cinema that often shows movies in their original language but it wouldn’t stoop to showing such commercial fare as the latest bond outing. 

I’m only now getting used to dubbing, in the UK and Australia the general practice with foreign movies is to keep the original dialogue track and add subtitles.  When I have caught a piece dubbed into English it has been so uniformly bad that I have grown up to have a rather snobby attitude to the process.  In my time here I’ve seen enough dubbed entertainment to begin to reassess my opinion.  I started watching TV as an aid to learning the language and while I tried as much as possible to watch Italian productions there is so much American television on the screens here that I invariably ended up watching some of those as well. 

The first thing I noticed was that dubbing here is completely different to what I had experienced before – they have separate actors for each character.  Not sure if it’s a cost cutting measure but in the UK they seem to hire one male and one female actor and get them to dub every character of their gender.  Not only in Italy do they hire a full cast of actors but many actors exclusively dub one actor.  As well as that they are also very good at finding a voice to match the actor they are dubbing.  By hiring proper performers and carefully selecting voices the productions have managed to keep the spirit of the original show – you’ll be happy to know that Gordon Ramsey is still a tosser in Italian. Watching American or British shows is not such a trial and as my language skills have improved I have begun to forget that I’m watching a dubbed show.

As for Mr Bond – something that is so British being in Italian was a bit strange but it wasn’t off putting.  Despite a year in Italy I’m still no way near fluent but I could follow the action – (ok it’s not David Mamet) but the jokes came a little too fast for my Italian so I missed much of the subtlety.  Of course I would have much preferred to watch the film in the original English, as good as the Italian dubbers are it is hard to hear another voice coming out of Judy Dench’s mouth.  All in all not a bad experience and I have resolved to try to get to the cinema more often.  Oh yeah and the movie wasn’t bad either.

Rather endearingly Italian cinemas still observe the interval.