| NYT: The ‘West Side Story’ Remake We Didn’t Need | |
| Posted by: Ballerina56 11:35 am EST 12/15/21 | |
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| Interesting comments by Yarimar Bonilla. She's the director of Centro, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, which assisted Tony Kushner in preparing his script. "They say the devil is in the details, and there are many that this film gets right, from the pale blue of the Puerto Rican flag on the nationalist murals in the set, to the specificity of slang words. But just because a historical text is accurate, does that make it authentic?" "Mr. Spielberg said that he chose not to use subtitles, so as not to give “English the power over the Spanish.” But the question of identity and language is complicated, and not all Latinos speak Spanish. When words are not translated their meaning and power can be easily lost. In one scene, Anita, played by Ariana DeBose, an Afro-Latina who identifies as queer, confronts her boyfriend, Bernardo, after he excludes her from a family conversation. She asks him if he’s rebuking her because she’s “prieta,” a derogatory term for someone with dark skin. This denunciation of colorism will likely be lost on English speakers. The over-accented Spanish, coaxed out of U.S.-born actors by dialect coaches, ultimately becomes a kind of linguistic brownface, providing little more than a facade of authenticity as thick and corny as the brown makeup worn by the actors in the original version. Was the point to make a film that speaks more authentically to a Latino public? Or one that non-Latinos would feel less guilty producing and consuming?" |
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| Link | The ‘West Side Story’ Remake We Didn’t Need |
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