When watching a subtitled film, one hardly tends to miss out on a dialogue. Perhaps that’s why most of them, thanks to our unconditional attention, leave us with a varied set of emotions.
Although it’s true that I’ve mostly watched ‘recommended’ ones and most of them seem to have turned out well.
Today, I happened to watch ‘The Salesman’ by Asghar Farhadi. The Iranian film which got nominated for Oscars.
The film has floored me with its approach to storytelling and I’m trying my best to compare it with a style but not able to. The story is a suspense drama which keeps you intrigued. The twists are so beautifully moulded in the narrative that there’s no change of tone required for the story to unfold like the usual suspense-dramas with ‘the’ climax. And maybe that’s the beauty of it. One needs to absorb the expressions, palpable anger, contained trauma which makes you anxiously worried.
The backdrop did remind me of how Khaled Hosseini writes and blends the timeline of Afghanistan’s history into his characters. In Salesman, Asghar Farhadi, does that but very subtly and you can even miss it, if you don’t have the slightest notion of what it entails. This pseudo-similarity can be termed absurd on the account that most stories of the region will share similar sensibilities. And anyway, I’m not claiming to be an expert after watching just one film.
There’s a definite contrast when you watch a subtitled foreign film and the regional Indian ones. The concept of a ‘hero’ in a story is so essential.
But let me not jump to conclusions here and make it a ‘review’ when it’s not. I’m still not able to write a review for ‘subtitled’ movies even when I regularly watch a few Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada ones. Without the dialogues, I still feel there might be something lost in the translations.
Or maybe I’m wrong here. And hopefully someday will add a few of those to the Blog.