To accent or not to accent

[selenak]

Some weeks back, when reviewing Einstein & Eddington, I mentioned that I couldn't tell whether Andy Serkis as Einstein was trying for a German accent or not, and that at any rate I always am somewhere between amused and irritated when in movies set in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, but shot in English, the characters affect a German accent. Since then, several films have been released, one of them Valkyrie (which hasn't started over here yet), and I've read a reviewer complaining that the characters there do not use German accents but rather their original ones (i.e. Scottish, English, American, as the case may be). Now, to me, this sounds like the better option. When I watch a film set in ancient Rome, I do not expect the characters to speak Latin (or Greek), or fake Italian accents. When the 1485486th version of The Three Musketeers hits the screen (in English), I don't expect a fake French accent. I know that in the former case the characters converse in Latin, and in the second in French, within the story the film is telling, not in English, but English is the actors' language, so naturally English is what we hear. Same with films and movies set in Germany but shot in English. Not that many exist which don't make their actors fake what they think of as German accents. (Trust me, in most cases the effort is really painful to hear when you're actually German.) Also? We have a lot of regional accents in Germany. You usually can tell where someone is from, just as you can tell whether someone is from the American South or the English North, etc. So when I watch a film sporting a variety of American/Scottish/British accents, I would assume that they're the equivalent of said plentitude of regional accents.

However, it has occured to me that maybe to an audience that is conditioned to hear characters supposed to be German talk in fake German accents, even when they're actually supposed to be conversing in their own language, natural accents would be breaking the suspension of disbelief, i.e. just the reverse of my own problem. (My suspension of disbelief being broken when I hear fake German accents in English.) So I'm curious:

[Poll #1326239]

Comments

[butterflykiki.livejournal.com]

The best compromise I ever saw for this was "Hunt for Red October", where the English actors spoke Russian with subtitles for the first scene or two-- and then one of the characters picked up a Bible to quote something menacing from Revelations. The camera zoomed in on his lips, speaking it in Russian-- then zoomed out, and he was speaking English, no accent, and the subtitles were gone, and the Russian characters were then understood to be speaking Russian to each other from then on, with the audience 'overhearing' it in English, so to speak. They kept up the subtitles when Russian was spoken in front of American characters who didn't speak Russian, since like LOST, it was a plot point, but sometimes they weren't used for comic effect too. Anyway, I liked the zoom in/out device, because it cut out all the accents, subtitles, and so on, but clued in even the slowest audience member that hi, still speaking Russian amongst themselves.

[redfiona10.livejournal.com]

I was going to use that as an example of where they play with accents wonderfully well.