Accents Will Happen

Then there are films that offer a cornucopia of ethnic delights for the accent aficionado, such as Captain Corelli's Mandolin. For starters, we have Cage as the opera-loving fascist who wouldn't hurt a fly, much less a figlia. Then we have Penelope Cruz, a hot-blooded Spaniard, playing a warm-blooded Greek. Add John Hurt, with his dignified Anglo-Mediterranean phrasings, and David Morrissey, a Nazi who sounds more like the Marquis of Tewkesbury, and you have one of the most satiating smorgasbords of broken English since the days of Zorba the Greek, Doctor Zhivago and Fiddler on the Roof. This is a film even a blind man could enjoy.

Sadly, movies brimming with ethnic accents do not always do especially well at the box office. Though Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman honed their brogues to a fare-thee-well in Far and Away, the movie was not a hit, nor was O Brother or Captain Corelli. Indeed, my all-time favorite motion picture in this genre was a complete flop. Gotcha!, released in 1985, stars Anthony Edwards as a spoiled college kid who goes to Paris during summer break and winds up in bed with Linda Fiorentino, a femme fatale. Ostensibly a graduate student in a famous French film school, Fiorentino brandishes a dense, exotic accent, but it certainly isn't French. It's Russian or Eastern European something. It is quite overpowering, crushing everything in its path. All right, let's call a spade a spade: she sounds exactly like Natasha from Rocky & Bullwinkle.

Eventually Fiorentino comes clean and admits that she is not actually French, but "Czechoslowakian." She reveals her name is Sasha, further confusing things because Sasha is not a common Czech name, especially among girls. But then it turns out that Sasha is only a nickname, and her real name is Alexis, also not a name you hear a lot in Prague. Let's just say she's from out of town.

In a lesser movie, Fiorentino's globe-trotting accent would merely have been played for laughs. Here it is not. Rather, it is an integral part of the plot, as becomes apparent when she persuades her lover to accompany her to East Berlin, where they will smuggle out strudel. At first glance, it would seem that the character played by Edwards is a complete moron, as the strudel delivery scam is clearly a front for an espionage ring. Yet he agrees. Only toward the end of the film does it become apparent that Edwards goes along with the dangerous pastry smuggling operation because he can't understand a single fucking thing Fiorentino is saying. Nor could I.

Why aren't there more movies with jarring, attention-getting accents like this? Well, one reason so few actors volunteer to play a colorful ethnic is because the additional burden imposed on them by speaking with a consistently preposterous accent makes it difficult to do other things, like act. But Fiorentino is more than equal to the task.

"You are a weergin, yes?" she asks Edwards at one point.

"A weergin?"

"A weergin," she reiterates. "You're not yet being with a woman?"

Sacre bleu.

It was while I was watching Fiorentino display such grace under linguistic pressure that I went back and looked at the two movies I had singled out for so much abuse a decade ago. In the case of Moonstruck, my opinion has not changed one iota: Cher still sounds like she's stuck in the wrong ethnic group with the wrong dialogue coach in the wrong movie. But for Olivier, I now have a new-found respect and forthwith retract all my previous calumnies. How Olivier could keep a straight face while saying, "If you don't know _vere _you come from, how do you know vere you're going?" is still one of the great mysteries in the history of motion pictures. But then I remind myself that this is the guy who kept a straight face while Neil Diamond, jazz cantor, was serenading him with an impromptu version of "Hava Nagila."

Oy.

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Joe Queenan wrote "The Last Score" for the November issue of Movieline.

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