Rub a dub dub

MARQUEE

Someone asked me recently whether I approved of films being dubbed in other languages (as opposed to being subtitled). My gut instinct was to say a fascist "absolutely not".

Dubbing has been anathema to me for as long as I can remember. Years ago, when Roberto Benigni's much-praised La Vita e Bella (Life is Beautiful), about an Italian Jewish family using humour and fantasy to stave off the horrors of the Holocaust, was released in our multiplexes (probably for no other reason than that it had been nominated for the Oscars), I exasperated friends with my refusal to be part of any plan to see it.

Normally so keen to watch anything non-mainstream (and in those days choices were very limited), in this case I insisted on waiting for the videocassette to appear in the British Council library. The reason? The film had been dubbed in English.

It was a stubbornly purist attitude, but I stuck to it. The way I saw it, a film's original soundtrack "" the way the dialogue is spoken, each inflexion of tone "" is crucial to the overall effect, even if you don't understand the words. (My reference point for this is always the Beast's haunted, recurring cry of "Belle!" in Jean Cocteau's luminous version of Beauty and the Beast, a cry that becomes almost a poetic refrain for the film; I don't see how another actor could possibly capture the same pathos while dubbing.)

And in certain types of films "" where historical setting is important, where there is a specific cultural context, or where the script is actor-oriented "" retaining the original soundtrack becomes even more important. At the best of times it's difficult to sink into a film where there is an obvious disconnect between the visuals and the words issuing out of the actors' lips.

Prudishness doesn't help. On a TV channel once I saw a Hindi-dubbed version of Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, where the subject of wife-swapping in 1970s America (dealt with largely in the film's dialogue) is integral to the plot. But the dubbing team wasn't prepared to be explicit about what was going on, and this greatly diluted the film's comprehension value ""which raises the question, why dub this particular movie at all?

However, of late, I've been forced to reconsider the martinet stance, to recognise that some of these objections are the objections of someone who analyses films and writes professionally about them, not the casual moviegoer whose primary aim is to be entertained for two hours. With that in mind, here are some of the areas where dubbing can be justified:

When international cinema is being brought to a middle-class audience that isn't comfortable with accented English or with reading subtitles "" though this works best with genre movies where the viewer doesn't have to process very complex themes or ideas, and where cultural context is not too important. Recent example: the dubbing of the Ben Stiller slapstick comedy Night at the Museum into the evocatively titled Museum ke Andar Phas Gaya Sikandar, currently playing on our screens. (It's another matter that this will translate into even more bottom-of-the-barrel Hollywood coming in to compete with bottom-of-the-barrel Bollywood!)

Movies meant specifically for children, including animated films "" though I'm not sure how the recently released Happy Feet, with its gangsta and Broadway references, can be successfully translated into Hindi.

Cases where the quality of subtitling is even more appalling than the worst dubbing could be. This is widespread, starting with the treatment given to one of our national treasures, Satyajit Ray. Ray's movies, commonly available on DVD, are subtitled so badly that a Bengali friend told me it took him and his non-Bengali wife five hours to get through a film (because he had to keep pausing it and explain to her what was going on).

Dubbing can work in the above cases, but only as a last resort. And that's as open-minded as I'm willing to be!