Sex and the City: Le film

I just bought the tickets, so tonight Ally and I are going to see the "Sex and the City" movie--or as they call it here, "Sex and the City: Le Film." It's a good thing they put that French word in the title or audiences would have been confused.

When I bought the tickets, the receptionist made sure I knew the film would be in French. This is called version française (VF). Apparently a few theaters--none of which are in Aix--are showing it in English with French subtitles, which is version originale (VO). A movie is more likely to be shown in VO if it is serious, dramatic, or in some sense a classic. It may surprise you to learn that, among mass-appeal pictures, action films are more likely to be shown in VO than comedies are; I think it's because comedy audiences want to understand the dialogue whereas action audiences care more about the explosions. (Whatever the reason, we were able to see the Lord of the Rings, Matrix, and Star Wars movies in VO. For Harry Potter in VO, we had to go to Monaco, but there aren't many movie theaters in Nice anyway.)

"SATC" is, let's face it, a fluffy comedy spun off from a television series. In our country there is a dim memory that the series was first shown on HBO alongside such weighty fare as "The Sopranos" and "The Wire" and earned many awards before it was bowdlerized and put in endless repetition on TBS. In France, "SATC" went straight to late-night television. Needless to say, on television it was dubbed. Of course, this being France, they could show everything. So the audience expects to hear Carrie and the gang speaking French. The bottom line is that the movie will make more money being shown in VF. Some big city theaters will have it in VO, so we might see it again.

The film enters general release in France today, but Americans won't see it in their multiplexes until Friday. Why? In France, films premiere on Wednesdays--Wednesday is the French film industry's Friday.