THE TRANSLATORS
****
Director: Régis Roinsard
Screenwriters: Régis Roinsard, Romain Compinet & Daniel Presley.
Principal cast:
Lambert Wilson
Olga Kurylenko
Riccardo Scamarcio
Sidse Babett Knudsen
Eduardo Noriega
Alex Lawther
Country: France/Belgium
Classification: M
Runtime: 105 mins.
Australian release date: 17 September 2020.
If you are a lover of ensemble whodunits like Agatha Christie’s Death On The Nile and Murder On The Orient Express, you’ll have a lot of fun with Régis Roinsard’s The Translators. Like those titles, this film features a roomful of possible perpetrators confined together in one particular location when a crime is committed, so all of them immediately become suspects. The director got the idea for the plot when he read that, for the translation of a new Dan Brown book, 12 translators had been locked up in a bunker in Italy. It started him thinking, “What if the book were stolen, pirated despite all the precautions taken?”
The third book in a best-selling, globally successful trilogy is complete, ready for publication. Written in French, Dedalus: The Man Who Did Not Want to Die has been eagerly awaited by millions of fans around the world and the smug publisher, Eric Angstrom (Lambert Wilson), is keen for its early release. Accordingly, he has selected nine translators to work on the manuscript simultaneously, translating the work into English, Danish, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Greek and German. To achieve his aim, he has rented the high-security chateau of a Russian oligarch somewhere in the French countryside to confine the group together until such time as the job is done, giving them just 10 pages at a time. All their electronic equipment is confiscated on arrival, so no correspondence can be carried out with the outside world. They are completely shut off, under lock and key, marooned, as it were. So, when Angstrom receives a threatening text saying that the first lot of pages has been leaked and will be released on the internet unless a hefty ransom is paid, all nine translators are considered culpable. Making things even more muddled is the fact that the identity of the author, Oscar Brach, is unknown, like Elena Ferrante in the real world. Only Angstrom claims to have met him. The theft pits the translators against one another and each one has a theory why this one or that one is responsible for the crime. Jump forward two months and we see the publisher interviewing an unseen person in gaol, asking him/her how they did it but, of course, as is the nature of whodunits, nothing is quite as it seems.
Many of the international cast of The Translators will be familiar faces to lovers of film festivals and SBS’ World Movies. Wilson, Scamarcio, Knudsen, Kurylenko and Noriega are well-known in the global film industry, often performing in English as well as their native tongues. Here, the lingua franca is French but smatterings of many other languages are heard, too. The other actors in the ensemble may not be as recognisable to Australian viewers but, in some ways, that serves the material well; because they’re unknown to us, they (and the characters they play) are even more suspicious. Is it him? Is it her? Is it everyone? [A note about the subtitles: it’s annoying, and somewhat slack of the production company, that throughout the film Brach’s name is incorrectly written as Bach, and Dedalus spelt as Daedalus]. That minor quibble aside, the entire cast comport themselves well as, little by little, their individual backstories are revealed. An atmospheric score by Jun Miyake ramps up the tension as the drama unfolds.
The Translators will keep you guessing until the end, as it should. There are layers upon layers built into the clever script and it delivers surprise after surprise. It may not be Agatha Christie but it gets very close.
Screenwriters: Régis Roinsard, Romain Compinet & Daniel Presley.
Principal cast:
Lambert Wilson
Olga Kurylenko
Riccardo Scamarcio
Sidse Babett Knudsen
Eduardo Noriega
Alex Lawther
Country: France/Belgium
Classification: M
Runtime: 105 mins.
Australian release date: 17 September 2020.
If you are a lover of ensemble whodunits like Agatha Christie’s Death On The Nile and Murder On The Orient Express, you’ll have a lot of fun with Régis Roinsard’s The Translators. Like those titles, this film features a roomful of possible perpetrators confined together in one particular location when a crime is committed, so all of them immediately become suspects. The director got the idea for the plot when he read that, for the translation of a new Dan Brown book, 12 translators had been locked up in a bunker in Italy. It started him thinking, “What if the book were stolen, pirated despite all the precautions taken?”
The third book in a best-selling, globally successful trilogy is complete, ready for publication. Written in French, Dedalus: The Man Who Did Not Want to Die has been eagerly awaited by millions of fans around the world and the smug publisher, Eric Angstrom (Lambert Wilson), is keen for its early release. Accordingly, he has selected nine translators to work on the manuscript simultaneously, translating the work into English, Danish, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Greek and German. To achieve his aim, he has rented the high-security chateau of a Russian oligarch somewhere in the French countryside to confine the group together until such time as the job is done, giving them just 10 pages at a time. All their electronic equipment is confiscated on arrival, so no correspondence can be carried out with the outside world. They are completely shut off, under lock and key, marooned, as it were. So, when Angstrom receives a threatening text saying that the first lot of pages has been leaked and will be released on the internet unless a hefty ransom is paid, all nine translators are considered culpable. Making things even more muddled is the fact that the identity of the author, Oscar Brach, is unknown, like Elena Ferrante in the real world. Only Angstrom claims to have met him. The theft pits the translators against one another and each one has a theory why this one or that one is responsible for the crime. Jump forward two months and we see the publisher interviewing an unseen person in gaol, asking him/her how they did it but, of course, as is the nature of whodunits, nothing is quite as it seems.
Many of the international cast of The Translators will be familiar faces to lovers of film festivals and SBS’ World Movies. Wilson, Scamarcio, Knudsen, Kurylenko and Noriega are well-known in the global film industry, often performing in English as well as their native tongues. Here, the lingua franca is French but smatterings of many other languages are heard, too. The other actors in the ensemble may not be as recognisable to Australian viewers but, in some ways, that serves the material well; because they’re unknown to us, they (and the characters they play) are even more suspicious. Is it him? Is it her? Is it everyone? [A note about the subtitles: it’s annoying, and somewhat slack of the production company, that throughout the film Brach’s name is incorrectly written as Bach, and Dedalus spelt as Daedalus]. That minor quibble aside, the entire cast comport themselves well as, little by little, their individual backstories are revealed. An atmospheric score by Jun Miyake ramps up the tension as the drama unfolds.
The Translators will keep you guessing until the end, as it should. There are layers upon layers built into the clever script and it delivers surprise after surprise. It may not be Agatha Christie but it gets very close.