The Interpreter
| 18 Aug 2007
The characters in this Geneva-set thriller are sticklers when it comes to usage. The young heroine is hired as a translator for a Russian expatriate and his French-speaking lawyer, and she enters the dark, dangerous world of linguistic pedantry, where John Humphries and Lynne Truss would be worshipped as deities. "My ex-wife was Russian," the lawyer explains at one point, clarifying: "She's still Russian, she's just no longer my wife." Even the heroine's engineer father picks her up on a fleeting error in her Russian phrasing. I am no linguist, but it seems to me that monoglot English-speakers may not be the ideal audience for a film with such habits. Most subtitlers show a stubborn disregard for grammatical nuance and cultural specificity, generally opting to turn any phrase, whatever the language and whoever the speaker, into Michael Mann-style Americanese.
The heroine is portrayed as a go-between in her personal life as in her work: she lives in steely Geneva but longs for mysterious Moscow; she gets sexually involved with the slimy lawyer while forming an emotional attachment with the haunted gangster. As a thriller, the film is too restrained to be exciting: there are no death threats at dawn, and a chase takes place at a food market without a single fruit stall being toppled. It is more at home when squeezing translation for its metaphorical juices, and at one point delivers a confounding, memorably eerie image which demonstrates the influence of modern technology on cultural dislocation: two men standing face to face, talking to one another in different languages.
The heroine is portrayed as a go-between in her personal life as in her work: she lives in steely Geneva but longs for mysterious Moscow; she gets sexually involved with the slimy lawyer while forming an emotional attachment with the haunted gangster. As a thriller, the film is too restrained to be exciting: there are no death threats at dawn, and a chase takes place at a food market without a single fruit stall being toppled. It is more at home when squeezing translation for its metaphorical juices, and at one point delivers a confounding, memorably eerie image which demonstrates the influence of modern technology on cultural dislocation: two men standing face to face, talking to one another in different languages.