Language is destiny in American film market

By Anthony Kaufman The New York Times

MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 2006

NEW YORK Not long ago, the wall between American audiences and foreign-language movies seemed about to collapse, as Ang Lee's Chinese martial arts blockbuster "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" scooped up 10 Oscar nominations in 2001 and more than $128 million in ticket sales for its American distributor, Sony Pictures Classics.

 

But far from crumbling, the barrier has since grown more forbidding, and film industry insiders warn that dwindling attention from the news media and an unexpected boom in lower-budget prestige movies like Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" are making matters even worse.

 

In 2005, just 10 foreign-language films had ticket sales of more than $1 million in the United States. Like "Crouching Tiger," the leaders were martial arts fantasies. The top grosser, Stephen Chow's "Kung Fu Hustle," ranked No. 116 at the domestic box office, with $17.1 million in receipts. That was a sharp drop from 2004, when 18 films crossed the million-dollar mark, and Zhang Yimou's "House of Flying Daggers" had $11 million in ticket sales (much of that from 2005). But some of the best-reviewed foreign films of 2005 - "La Niña Santa" (The Holy Girl), "Rois et Reine" (Kings and Queen), "3-Iron," "Kontroll," "Turtles Can Fly," "La Meglio Gioventù" (Best of Youth) - struggled to crack $300,000 in America.

 

"What's changed and what's regrettable is that there are fewer successful foreign-language films than in the past," said Michael Barker, a co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which distributed both "Kung Fu Hustle" and "House of Flying Daggers" in the United States.

 

The Sony unit, in the past a mainstay of the foreign-language market in America, has cut its subtitled offerings to between one-half and one-third of its slate, down from two-thirds in the past. "We're becoming more and more selective," Barker said. "There is long-term business in foreign-language films, but it's still very tough."

 

Increased selectivity has left dozens of smaller movies in the dust. For this year's Academy Awards, for example, a record 91 countries submitted entries to the foreign-language category; only seven have American distribution, the lowest number in years. By comparison, more than 20 entries for the 2003 awards were distributed here.

 

Foreign movies in the United States are generally regarded as more dependent on reviews and publicity than domestic films, and Mark Urman, head of theatrical releasing for the art-house distributor ThinkFilm, blames the lack of media attention on dwindling audience interest. "Nobody's writing about them, because nobody cares, and nobody cares because they don't penetrate the culture," he said. "It's a vicious cycle."

 

Meyer Gottlieb, the president of Samuel Goldwyn Films, agrees. "You have to throw a bomb at a paper to get them to pay attention to foreign films," he said.

 

Even strong reviews didn't sustain Jacques Audiard's 2005 release "De Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arrêté" (The Beat That My Heart Skipped), a French remake of the 1978 American film "Fingers," which would have done better at the box office three or four years ago, said the film's distributor Marie Therese Guirgis, head of Wellspring Media. "It's done well in every single market, but a few years ago, it would have made closer to $2 million as opposed to $1 million," she said.

 

Along with the media, Guirgis also faulted the profligacy of "mini-major pseudo-indie productions" - star-studded films like "Brokeback Mountain" and Fernando Meirelles's "Constant Gardener" - which are distributed by divisions of the major Hollywood studios but compete for the same art house space as foreign titles. "Those films take up those screens because the studios have realized that they can make money on them," Guirgis said.

 

Those divisions generally gun for bigger profits than most foreign-language films can provide. As for foreign films that don't offer high-flying action scenes, Bob Berney, president of the distributor Picturehouse, said, "I don't see Focus or Fox Searchlight doing them." His previous company, Newmarket films, did well last year with the Hitler drama "Der Untergang" (Downfall), but Picturehouse, owned by Time Warner, won't release another foreign-language film until 2007, when it handles "Mongol," a Mongolian epic about Genghis Khan.

 

"The Constant Gardener," an English-language film set largely in Africa, exemplifies another threatening trend for subtitled films. Foreign-born directors like Meirelles, known for his Brazilian gang drama "Cidade de Deus" (City of God), quickly make the leap to films that rely on English-language stars and are made for American tastes. So fewer accomplished foreign directors are working in the culture and craft of their homelands.

 

"The residual effect," Urman said, "is that national cinemas don't get a chance to gain traction. There's no such thing as an affinity with German films, because the second you find a German director you like, then he becomes an English-language director."

 

"I feel as if there's almost no auteur draw anymore," Guirgis said, "as opposed to 20 years ago, you were marketing the movies around the filmmaker - Fassbinder's new film, Godard's new film. We still do it, but the honest truth is that the filmmaker matters increasingly little today."

 

Documentaries are also encroaching on foreign film turf, noted Urman, whose company released this year's nonfiction hit "The Aristocrats." "If I want a Hollywood alternative, I don't need to see a film with subtitles," he said. "I can see several new documentaries."

 

Even the industrywide boom in DVD sales has been a mixed blessing for foreign-language movies, which might seem suited for the intimacy of home viewing but do the bulk of their business in theaters. "The smaller the screen, the more problematic it is that you're looking at subtitles," Urman said.

 

Still, Sony Pictures Classics and Wellspring have built up large libraries of foreign gems that continue to sell well on DVD. (Wellspring's home video release of Akira Kurosawa's "Ran" has been a consistent top-seller.) And some art house distributors hail the arrival of Netflix, the mail-order rental company. It says the percentage of foreign film rentals has varied little; it was 5.3 percent in 1999, when the company was founded, and 5.8 percent today.

 

But to many cinephiles, home screens are not much of a haven. "Imagine never seeing an Antonioni movie on the big screen," Guirgis said. "There are so many filmmakers you wouldn't like if you just rented them on video."