I went to a French cinema on Friday evening for the first time. Les Cardinaux in Damgan is a small one-screen cinema that only shows films in the winter on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Les Cardinaux looks like a hut from the outside and is small with only 150 seats. It’s quite possible (as I did) to accidentally turn right rather than left at the entrance and end up in the projection room rather than the auditorium. Actually the entire audience could have watched it from the projection room as, apart from me, there were only two other people at the performance!!
I don’t think I’m ready for a film in French quite yet so the trick is to look for films in VOSTF (Version Original avec sous-titres français) and so I went to see Four Lions. At least it’s called “Four Lions” in English but in French mysteriously the title became “We Are Four Lions” – I’d welcome any insight from the French readers as to why that should have been changed.
Watching a film in VOSTF is a bit confusing, do I watch in English and ignore the sub-titles or read the sub-titles and use the English soundtrack to fill in the words I don’t know? (We are) Four Lions didn’t make the Oscar nominations for good reasons and includes a lot of, shall we say, industrial language. So by reading the subtitles I did achieve my objective of expanding my French vocabulary – although not necessarily with words I’d want to use in social settings ……
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