For the French who saw Inglourious Basterds

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From what I've read, the criticism seems to be along the lines of her dialogue was too wooden, delivered too theatrically or like she was in a play rather than a film, etc...part of that might be the dialogue itself, part of that might be being under the direction of someone who doesn't speak the language of the scenes they're shooting, I don't know. There's a lot of discussion on the topic at allocine.fr.

Here's a quote from a Vanity Fair article about the film's dialogue:
"That same intransigence affected the entire shooting process. Mélanie Laurent, a French actress who plays a seductive Jewish cinema owner, recalls her fruitless effort to question Tarantino’s vision:

“I remember finding some of the phrasings in the French translations [of Tarantino’s subtitled dialogue] to be a bit hard to say. At one point, I had this expression to say that really seemed improbable to say in French. I told him, but there was no negotiating. He said, ‘We can invent. Who’s to say we can’t invent new expressions?’ He likes certain sounds. He likes certain words in French and he wants to hear them.”"
link: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2009/08/tarantino-is-one-basterd-who-knows-how-to-please-himself.html

I'm french and I thought Mélanie played her part flawlessly.Many french critics were disappointed because they expected a real "Holocaust" movie ala THE PIANIST,AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS or SCHINDLER'S LIST but they forgot that this movie is above all based on a comic book therefore some parts and the acting itself were supposed to be quircky,odd,excentric,less formal,...or whatever.
I think Mélanie and Christoph Waltz delivered the best performances in the movie(which is a masterpiece in my book).







OSCARS 2010 : COLIN FIRTH/MELANIE LAURENT/ CHRISTOPH WALTZ/MO'NIQUE

Okay, I understand. Thank you for posting that!

Mélanie has done theater, and I ended up rewatching it and paying attention especially to the French parts... and I sort of understand what they're saying. At one point, Marcel says something like "Oui, Shosanna, nous pourrions..." (which just means 'yes, we could') in talking about their plan for the Nazi premiere.

I've never heard anyone say "nous pourrions" in casual conversation, especially to someone they are intimate with... "On peut" means essentially the same thing and it's way less formal... I could be wrong, maybe a lot of people speak that formally, but it just struck me as odd.

I still hold my opinion that Mélanie did a fantastic job... Translations are more than one-for-word substitutions. But if the dialogue is in the script, and Tarantino doesn't speak or know French, what can ya do?

I'm now curious to hear what Germans have to say about the German dialogue. Haha.

-Je suis française. Nous respectons les réalisateurs dans notre pays. Y compris les Allemands, oui.

That's good to hear! Unfortunately, that wasn't a problem limited to French critics -- I'd heard the same here when it first came out regarding the movie as a whole. IMO, the title "Inglourious Basterds" and the fact it's Quentin Tarantino alone should have been a tip-off that it's not meant to be a serious look at WWII.

Oddly, I've heard nothing but good things about the German translation. At the time of shooting Basterds, though, Mélanie had never set foot on a stage to act in a play -- she's only just started rehearsing for the one she's doing in the spring.

I hesitate to disagree with native perspective on the delivery of the dialogue, because I'm not fluent enough in the language to understand the cadence that intimately, but a lot of the praise by non-French speakers seems to focus on her facial acting/expressions anyway. Of course, there are plenty of native speakers who liked her performance just fine, so in the end, it still boils down to opinion rather than language or even cultural barriers.

I thought she'd done something before in theatre... Oh well. Haha.

Nous respectons les réalisateurs dans notre pays.

Leave the critics to the French, and the success to Mélanie here in the States! She did a wonderful job, and being a period piece so to speak, she took no risk at using modern colloquialism. She has a simple truthful way of playing, without any mannerism we see too often with precious young actresses.