Film - Jonathan Romney urges the media to be more receptive to foreign cinema
I have two current film magazines on my desk, one American, one Canadian, both containing international critics' polls of the most important films and film-makers of the past decade. Among the most frequently cited names are Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-hsien; both will mean something to British audiences, but, given the facts of distribution, not as much as they should. Kiarostami is the Iranian director whose film The Taste of Cherry was joint winner of the 1998 Cannes Palme d'Or; it failed to make much of a mark when released here last year. His most recent film was a hit in France, but it has yet to find a definite British outlet.
The Taiwanese film-maker Hou is considered by some to be today's single most important director. He is certainly among the most demanding - his Flowers of Shanghai is one of the most soporific films I have ever struggled through, but then it is set in an opium-steeped brothel. Nevertheless, it went down extremely well with the Paris public. Again, there is no sign of a release here.
If you consider the receptivity of the French art-house audience, and of North America's more serious critics, there is a definite feeling that Britain is letting itself be short-changed where foreign-language cinema is concerned. It is as if a film can only register, and then but marginally, on our consciousness if it has the Miramax stamp of approval, like the wretched Life is Beautiful. A favourite game for British critics at international festivals is to lament, with masochistic relish, that the best films are unlikely ever to find an outlet or a public here. It is ridiculous that we know next to nothing of the dizzily entertaining French-based Georgian director Otar Iosseliani, or of Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang, whose apocalyptic musical, The Hole, was the most extraordinary of all millennium films.
We just reconcile ourselves to the reality of festival films never achieving a commercial afterlife. But, given the statistics, things don't look that bad. Of the films currently lined up for more or less definite release over the next few months, I've counted one Japanese, one Swedish, one Brazilian, two German, two Belgian, one Czech, one Danish, two Russian, one Norwegian, one Portuguese, one Dutch and ten French. Not bad, if a touch Eurocentric; the recent wave of interest in Asian cinema may have passed for now.
Yet there is a sense that we are living more than ever in a Hollywood-dominated culture blind to the wider patterns of international cinephilia, and that the foreign-language cinema we get isn't always the most exciting. Some distributors may be lazy or blinkered, others downright quixotic in their enthusiasms, but a financial bottom line also determines what we see: sales companies may ask crazy prices for films with modest expectations, and television sales - without which distributors cannot risk buying a film - are harder to come by.
There is also the way that the British media regard the outside world. For us, film is Hollywood and a small favoured brand of have-a-go Brits. World cinema isn't news, not compared to Gwyneth Paltrow's latest frock or Vinnie Jones wielding a baseball bat. At Cannes, you sit in press screenings and gaze enviously over shoulders at the acreage of festival coverage in Liberation or El PaIs. Here, film suffers from the same cultural xenophobia that makes leading European literary figures such as Jose Saramago or Orhan Pamuk barely register as blips.
Xenophobia may be the big problem for marketing to tackle. At a conference on French cinema, I heard someone complain that French films always appear pretentious because distributors like to retain the original French title. If that's a problem, how are Anglophone punters supposed to tell the difference between, say, Xiao Wu, Maborosi, Hana-Bi and Ikinai? Personally, I have more trouble distinguishing between American titles such as Double Jeopardy, Deep Impact, Deep Rising and Mercury Rising.
It is significant that the only foreign-language cinema that has recently caused a major stir among British cine- chatterers has been a cosmopolitan venture that also has a ready-made package of methodology and rhetoric. Festen was a hit here not least because it resembled a TV movie that could as easily have been British as Danish; but also because the Dogme rules it observes offer a DIY approach that impoverished film students can easily try for themselves. No one in his right mind would dream of emulating the rigorous methods of a Hou or a Kiarostami.
The Dogme phenomenon was a triumph of marketing, and that is where exhibitors and distributors need to sharpen up. But the media, too, needs to be more sceptical about the nature of marketing, less in thrall to the assumption that a film counts only if it is supported by multimillion-dollar PR clout.
Once in a while, however, a surprise hit proves that we can see beyond our noses - for example, the current success of the Proust adaptation Time Regained. I am quite an admirer of Anthony Minghella's new film, The Talented Mr Ripley, but, to be honest, it can wait a week; the films you really need to see now, while you can, are Ikinai - a wonderfully chilly Japanese black comedy about a coachload of suicidal businessmen - and the Belgian drama Rosetta, last year's Palme d'Or. Although, if the critics fling around the epithet "masterpiece" the way they did in Cannes last year, Rosetta will be the next art-house hit and you won't have to wait for the remake starring Gwyneth for it to change your life.
"Rosetta" (15) is currently on nationwide release; "Ikinai" is showing at the ICA Cinema, London
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