Bad dubbing can ruin a beautiful movie

I'v been a fan of foreign films for a long time. When I was a high schooler, I would check out the few shelves of overseas movies at National Video on a regular basis. It was there I discovered "Wings of Desire" and "Faraway, so close," two German films about angels who chose to become human - the latter a sequel of sorts to the first. I rented "Farewell, My Concubine," a Chinese film about two young boys who grow up in the world of Chinese opera and war. My friends and I ogled over Vincent Perez, the beautiful actor in the French films "Indochine" and "Queen Margot."

Most of these films I watched alone in my room since my parents were not fans of anything with subtitles - and had they known the mature content of some of the films, I probably wouldn't have been watching them at all. But I've always had a weak spot for a good foreign film. There is something so different about them from most American-made movies that is hard to describe - there is less talking and more emoting.

That is certainly the case with the French film "I've Love You So Long." I rented this a few weeks ago when there wasn't much else out on DVD or in the theaters. I was looking for a couple of good comedies, but settled instead for a movie about a woman out of prison after 15 years who tries to regain her life.

It had been on my must-see list for a while, but due to the somber tone I had to be in the right mood. So we rented it, got it home, and that's when I remembered it was a foreign film. The DVD cover doesn't really give it away, but the subtitles certainly did and my mom requested watching the dubbed version. The great thing about the dubbed version is that Kristen Scott Thomas (who plays Juliette Fontaine) does the voice in both versions. The bad thing is everyone else in the movie sounds like a Japanese anime character in the English dubbing. There is little actual voice acting going on, and it sounds mostly like the characters were just reading from a script.

It made it really hard to get into the movie, even though it was superbly written. The movie follows Juliette who is just out of prison after serving 15 years for murder. Her sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) invites Juliette to stay with her, and Juliette slowly starts to put the pieces of her life back together. There are long pauses in the movie where Thomas lights up a cigarette and says little. It allows the facts about her to come out slowly in the movie, and little by little the reader learns pieces about her life that seem incongruous with her being a murderer, especially once we learn who the victim was.

Unfortunately, the ever cheery voice given to Lea does little to show the younger sister's torn feelings about accepting someone guilty of murder into her home. The movie is worth a watch but to do it justice, please just read the subtitles and skip the English-dubbed version.