In 2008, Let The Right One In was a critical and box office success. The Swedish film that is something of a coming of age vampire tale gained immediate cult status. Just two years later, the film will get an American makeover complete with a new title, Let Me In. Another recent foreign buzz film is The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo from 2009. David Fincher is currently in preproduction on the Hollywood versioning of this Swedish film. It would seem that there is a recent trend taking shape in which films are remade from one language to another, even from English to Chinese. That is precisely what happened with A Woman, A Gun, and a Noodle Shop which hit theaters last week. The film is a retelling of Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film, Blood Simple. and was directed by one of China’s best known directors, Zhang Yimou.
Truth told, revamping foreign films is nothing new. Akira Kurosawa’s classic samurai film Yojimbo was remade twice in Hollywood. Three years after Kurosawa’s film was released, Sergio Leone borrowed the storyline for a stunning spaghetti western remake with A Fistful of Dollars. The plot was again remade in Walter Hill’s 1996 film, Last Man Standing. I can also recall in 2002 when Christopher Nolan remade a Norwegian film from 1997 also called Insomnia. And of course, there is the strange story of the auteur working antithetically to Hollywood, Michael Haneke remaking his own Funny Games shot by shot in 2007 (ten years after the original). Surely there are many more examples.
As much as one may prefer that audiences experience a narrative in it’s native tongue the way it were originally conceived, the truth is that more often than not this would simply mean that many audiences wouldn’t experience the story at all. As a critical audience, we have the choice to simply take a pass on versions that we are not interested in. This is precisely what I did with the aforementioned Haneke film. After experiencing the original and knowing the shot for shot nature of the remake, I couldn’t possibly imagine any new light being shed. However, it’s worth considering that there is a cultural dialogue that happens with each iteration. Just as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo had been adapted from the printed page, surely David Fincher will be influenced in some way by the first screen version.