About ten years ago, I was queuing behind a couple in Blockbuster who handed the box of the French romantic comedy Amélie over the counter only to be warned by the assistant, “You do realise it’s subtitled?” Though the film couldn’t have looked more Gallic if it had been packaged inside a baguette, staff had clearly been stung for refunds by hapless punters who’d got Amélie home and found it to be in a foreign language. I’d like to tell you the couple rented it anyway; actually, they went back for something less exotic.


I’m not judging that couple, but the story shows how toxic subtitles were not so long ago. Even crossover foreign-language hits were routinely advertised in multiplex-friendly trailers with no offputting dialogue. German thriller The Lives of Others was proudly promoted as an “Academy Award winner 2007” without specifying that it was for Best Foreign Language Film. But while there’s no shame in being subtitle- averse, a revolution is happening, ignited not in the cinema but the living room.

“World cinema” remains a relatively rarefied concern here, with just three – Untouchable (France), Headhunters (Norway) and The Raid (Indonesia) – breaching the £1 million UK box- office barrier in 2012, a fairly common pattern. However, in 2011, the Swedish original of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, followed by The Girl Who Played with Fire, dominated the non- English-speaking chart, hinting at a sea change.

Our gradual acceptance of TV with words at the bottom can be dated to 2009, when BBC4 flexed its remit and imported two moody Eurocop shows, Spiral from France and Wallander from Sweden, the latter reaching half a million viewers with its second series and upending conventional scheduling wisdom about subtitles. But it took Sarah Lund and The Killing to really open the floodgates. An actual Saturday-night phenomenon – from Denmark! – the whodunnit broke the one-million viewer mark in 2011 and the phrase “Scandi-drama” was minted.

My first experience of subtitled drama came in 1980 when, as a 14-year-old unable to sneak into “X” films, I joined a local film society and gained access to forbidden fruits such as The Deer Hunter and Halloween. I made the most of my £6.50 membership and saw as many of the 36 films in the 1980-81 season as I could, including the likes of Nagisa Oshima’s Japanese ghost story Empire of Passion and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Cuban meditation Memories of Underdevelopment – quite an education. I can’t claim to have found subtitles easy at that age, but they broadened my impressionable mind for adulthood.

What I love about subtitles – aside from the instant oral language lab they provide – is that they demand your undivided attention. This is easier in a cinema; at home, the combination of kettle, fridge, toilet and live pause means you rarely become transfixed by the screen, where the spell is also broken by ads. But with subtitles you mustn’t take your eyes off the screen for a second. To follow the political machinations of Borgen, for instance, you must surrender yourself to the telly, eyes front, back straight.

That is exactly the way to experience the acclaimed French zombie drama Les Revenants, which arrives this week on Channel 4 as The Returned (its first foreign acquisition for 20 years). Having broken audience records on classy cable network Canal+, it focuses less on foot-dragging horror and more on the emotional complexity of the previously deceased returning to a remote Alpine community – shades of BBC3’s English-speaking In the Flesh. It opens with a shocking event whose impact will have you scrabbling for your reading glasses. (One UK critic was moved to declaim, “France is the new Scandinavia.”)

With this, and the promise of BBC4’s first Flemish-language import, Salamander, who’s got time to make a cup of English tea?


See The Returned, Sundays 9:00pm, C4