Of Movies and Bad Accents
Watching “My Name is Khan”—the new Bollywood-meets-Hollywood Shahrukhan movie— was like breathing a lungful of wonderfully fresh air. Not only because the movie dealt with the September 11 attack and the subsequent stereotyping and harassment of Muslims with intelligence and sensitivity, but also because it delivered an authentic Islamic and ‘Arabic’ experience. The producers may have taken some creative licence in the timelines between events, but right from the first moment it was clear this movie is different from your typical commercial film because of the absence of silly mistakes about Islam in general and Arabs in particular. Clearly has to do with the fact that the acting and production teams included Muslims? It might also have helped that Imagenation Abu Dhabi (as one of the producers) may have vetted content with a qualified subject matter consultant? Maybe.
Mistakes abound in Hollywood. Remember Gwynth Paltrow as an UN interpreter in A Perfect Murder? Her Arabic –delivered in a smooth monotone—sounded like utter gibberish to an Arabic speaker. And of course there’s Body of Lies” which was partly shot in the UAE. The movie was full of bad Arabic and non-relevant accents. The movie’s gritty content was undermined by bursts of audience laughter whenever someone spoke ‘Arabic’. The movie was set in Iraq and Jordan and had a smattering of Dubai locations. While many of the characters were supposed to be Iraqi, the few actors who actually spoke ‘real’ Arabic had strong local dialects from Egypt, Morocco and other Arab countries. Not Iraq. And then there’s the Jordanian head of security, a central Arab character in the movie—this guy couldn’t deliver an Arabic phrase to save his life.
Sure as a non-Arabic speaker you may think it unreasonable to expect perfect accent casting since the majority of the film going audience is non Arab speaking. Well, yes… but to draw a parallel about what it feels like to an Arabic speaker, it’s like showing the Queen Elizabeth and her government speaking in a mix of Texan, Australian, Jamaican, South African and New Zealand English. Funny, right?
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