Middling Remakes, Great Danes?

By Steven Zeitchik

An English-language remake of a foreign film is like a certain kind of cover band -- capable of adding its own spin to the original but more likely reminding us why that original should have remained untouched.

Maybe it's the possibility of this challenge that lately has been inspiring studios to grab remake rights like John McCain grabs economic soundbites. Movies from German Oscar-winner "The Lives of Others" to Michael Haeneke's French-language media darling "Cache" are being developed as American tales (Haeneke's "Funny Games" already got the remake treatment), with the latest example Mandate's and Columbia's devotion to a Danish filmmaker named Ole Bornedal, who's been making genre-inflected arthouse films for over a decade (he was behind a pair of '90's movies called "Nightwatch," both Danish and English versions; the latter starred Ewan McGregor and came from Dimension).

Mandate has picked up redo rights to Bornedal's two most recent movies, an alien-classroom tale called "The Substitute," which has been set up at Columbia and which Mandate will develop as part of its Sam Raimi Ghost House label, and "Just Another Love Story," a tale of a photographer posing as the boyfriend of a woman who has amnesia until the woman's actual boyfriend turns up with revenge on his mind. That last one drew some nice attention at Sundance this past year; along with a Russian-language pic called "Mermaid," it was of the few foreign titles to land on American execs' radars.

Still, as promising as Bornedal's work is, the companies will have their work cut out for them. Most American remakes face a choice not easily resolved: hew too closely to the original and you show why the sensibility doesn't work in another setting (Cameron Crowe's "Vanilla Sky," a too-literal recapturing of Alejandro Amenabar's excellent "Abre Los Ojos," is Exhibit A). But try to reinvent too much and you lose what made the original work in the first place. Fans of "Cache" have been wondering how exactly Universal/Imagine will relocate that story to the U.S. and thus lose the Algerian subtexts; it's like making "Platoon" without the Vietnam War.

There's a reason foreign movies are more in vogue than ever with studios now (even though they're less in vogue than ever with actual audiences): because in a world where development execs want to convince nervous bosses that their films will turn out just fine, what better reference point than a an entire movie (even if the new project will look nothing like the original). It's a classic pitch-meeting move, and dilemma: it helps get the project greenlit faster even if it also makes the actual execution of that project more difficult.

Genre films may be the exception to all this, which is why we hold out more hope for the Bornedal pics. Murders, chases and mysteries tend to migrate more easily across national film cultures, and the combination of an arthouse or foreign sensibility with the post-lingual appeal of a pulse-stoppper is a potent one (Nimrod Antal, director of a riveting Hungarian-language genre-ish movie called "Kontroll" a few years ago, made the transition look easy when he directed the Screen Gems mote-thriller "Vacancy").

You might even say that American takes on foreign-language genre movies is like the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups of development projects -- it combines the twin goodness of auteur street cred with commercial sensibilities. Other types of remakes can be a sticky mess. But a chocolatey snack appeals no matter where you are in the world.