63 posts in and I’ve done my best to balance out American
shows with British ones, and even thrown in some Australian (shout out to Summer Heights High), but I’ve been hugely neglectful
from a linguistic perspective. Besides
some subtitled Spanish in Fear
The Walking Dead, and some other bits and bobs, everything has been an
English-language production. How can I
hope to guide people through the world of boxset quality (and boxset trash) if
I just stick to my mother tongue? Given this
blog is also dominated by me talking about myself, we should acknowledge that a
defining feature of mine, alongside lacking human emotion and laughing too
loudly, is my multilingualism. We’ll go
into that in more detail another time, as I know readers are keen to hear about
my voyages into French and German.
Instead, the first foreign language show to make it into Just One More Episode is
actually Danish. Readers, I give you The Rain (Regnen, in Danish,
but it seems the Danes also just call it The Rain).
And no, this isn’t the 1997 hit my Missy Elliott with
brackets after it containing the words Supa, Dupa and Fly. It’s a real Netflix original production. English speakers have traditionally shunned
foreign-language productions from mainstream consumption. Subtitles require reading, and reading feels,
for some people, too much like trying to watch a book. The effort required is not given easily, as
we Brits are indulged by the rest of the world speaking our language, and are
therefore too lazy to make any effort in the other direction. However, Netflix seems to have versions of
all its foreign-language programming dubbed into English. While this removes a barrier, it adds the new
one of lips not matching to sounds. I’ll
happily read thousands of words of subtitles to avoid the distraction of bad
dubbing – it can drag down any drama, making it feel like some sort of
pan-European lemon Cif advert. Watching
with subtitles has another benefit if you can’t understand the language at
hand. The constant reading requires more
attention than just listening, helping to keep those tippy-tappy fingers off
your smartphone and your terrible second-screening habits. So, with full focus, let me transport you to
a dystopian Denmark.
As I said in the last paragraph, before heading off on a
wild tangent, it’s about the rain.
There’s nothing worse in life than getting soaked in the rain, even
though it’s our natural state as Brits.
However, the rain in, er, The Rain, carries a virus. So, not only do your jeans get damp, not only
does wet sock (a fully recognised condition first discovered when you’ve just
put on fresh socks and then accidentally tread in your housemates’ shower puddles,
requiring a second pair of fresh socks) upset your toes, but you also die a
horrific death. In episode one, at
first, the rain is on its way. We watch
through the eyes of our heroine, Simone, as her father cryptically gathers the
family from their normal lives to whisk them to safety. The times he spends saying “there’s no time
to explain” is technically a perfectly sufficient period in which to give
everyone the full lowdown on what’s occurring.
But that wouldn’t be any fun. The
clouds gather, people get the washing in off the line, and Simone’s family are
hunkered down in a conveniently located bunker.
I’m obliged not to give too much away, but most of the
action then proceeds six years later.
Simone has raised her little brother, Rasmus, in Fritzl-esque isolation,
but how will the siblings cope back in the real world? As I said with Black
Mirror, I love a dystopian future.
In this one, you stay out the rain, you’re chased by people with drones
and you end up in a ragtag band of young survivors, the bright colours of whose
cagoules are only matched by the strength of their hormonal yearnings for each
other. There’s Jean (which sounds
delightfully like Sheen in Danish) who’s all curly hair and glasses, another
one with a bad attitude and backwards baseball cap signifying his bad attitude,
and also a blonde girl with traintracks, which you don’t see much of these
days. And many more. Like any young group of Europeans, they
squabble, swear and have an open-minded approach to nudity. They may also be an allegory for how a new
generation must clean up after their parents’ mistakes, but I’ll try not to
make everything about Brexit…
The whole series carries the tension of a summer BBQ:
everyone hopes it’s not going to rain.
Simone seems to be able to navigate around all of Denmark’s rural areas
from memory, conveniently coming across further bunkers in order to replenish
the group’s stock of cereal bars. In between,
back stories illuminate elements of our characters’ personalities, though the
effects of six years in a bunker seem completely overlooked for Simone and
Rasmus, but they’re probably busy focusing on the array of threats a
post-apocalyptic Denmark offers.
You’ll feel intellectual for consuming a boxset in a
different language, though Danish does sound curiously like English with all
the effort removed, a sort of aspirated sigh from the back of the throat. Have fun spotting words that are similar (to
go seems to be “go”) while the fun of trying to match the sounds to the
subtitles gradually wears off. As the
series went on, I found it harder and harder to remind myself that I didn’t
speak Danish, forgetting to read the subtitles as if there had been a sudden
comprehension miracle. Sure, I missed
some plot points, but we all know I do this in English anyway. Turns out I don’t listen, no matter what the
language.
Right, so that’s a fourth country of origin added into the
fold here, and there’ll be more to come.
Let’s not see the multitude of European tongues as a barrier to
union. Let’s look for what we have in
common. Some people don’t like reading
subtitles. Most people don’t like
getting soaked in the rain. And everyone
hates a wet sock.
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