One hour becomes six or eight
8 June 2025 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI finally dedicated myself to doing a thorough re-watch of the 55-minute chunk of "Twenty Years After" that I had viewed 'blind' and unsubtitled as it was originally intended -- which took about six or eight hours of study spread over two days. Next time I'm going to have to try to force myself to stop watching sooner... although in fact there are only about 30 minutes left of the story, including end-credits :-(
The deciphering process involved locating and reading the relevant sections from Chapters 79–90 in the French edition on Wikisource (which in the end meant reading almost all of the chapters in question), rewatching with phonetic Russian subtitles and a vast amount of pausing and dictionary-work, and finally watching with auto-translated English titles, once I had worked out how to switch between the two. Auto-translated dialogue being something best put off to the last since the often bizarre results tend to rob the scenes of all emotional impact, and it's easier to deal with in any case once you have a decent idea of what you are actually *hearing* underneath, and hence which words are being silently omitted or wildly misconstrued ;-)
In the case of this section it turns out that for some reason or other considerable chunks of it have no auto-subtitles at all, so it's just as well I was initially watching without -- it would have been very offputting if I'd been relying on the onscreen text to follow the plot, and then it vanished and left me stranded. (Though good subtitles do make an amazingly big difference when it comes to giving the illusion of comprehension; I can be happily watching a foreign film at the BFI in the belief that I am understanding almost every word, when in fact I'm largely back-translating the sense of what I'm reading, as revealed by the abrupt and vertiginous descent into incomprehension the moment something goes wrong with the 'soft-titling' system!)
One of the non-subtitled lines, when I listened to it more carefully, turned out to be Porthos randomly observing that d'Artagnan looked good in a beard, which amused me mightily given my original comments on the scene ("for someone whose moustache has more or less been a permanent trademark since the start of his career, Mikhail Boyarsky actually looks pretty good in a 'full set' :-D)
Boyarsky in a beard
In fact as usual I did get pretty much all of it plot-wise on the first viewing, while the 'crib' filled in most of the longer/more rapid dialogues where I could only catch a few words (but generally sufficient to identify those sections in the novel, e.g. Milo of Croton, who unsurprisingly defeated me entirely when encountered as an unexpected subject of prison conversation :-p) The big changes from the novel are, I think, actually active *improvements*: they have Charles II as a child present with his mother Henrietta-Maria, instead of his (historically accurate) little sister Minette, they have Mazarin's envoys lying to the English Queen in an active attempt to get her out of the country by telling her that the English population have revolted against Parliament to save the King (in Dumas, there is a perplexing lack of purpose for this piece of deliberate misinformation -- why bother, especially when the truth is bound to come out? -- but it makes a lot of sense that Mazarin is simply trying to rid himself unscrupulously of an unwelcome guest!), and, as a result, they have a much better motive for Athos' and Aramis's duel with said envoys, which in the book comes across as Aramis simply being out for a fight at any excuse (he tells Athos that he thinks he saw them laughing behind their backs...) They then have Aramis take the letter referring to Porthos and d'Artagnan from the body of the wounded Jussac, very neatly eliminating the whole convoluted sub-plot with a pitched battle and Raoul accidentally attacking Aramis.
A very notable change is that the film has d'Artagnan and Porthos spending an interminable eighty-three *days* in jail rather than a mere eighty-three hours, which is much more dramatically effective. Although it does raise the question of what Athos and Aramis were doing all that time, and why it took them quite so long to do anything about the fact that their friends appeared to have gone missing :-p And we miss the sequence from the book in which they follow the series of marks and child-like drawings left by d'Artagnan along the way to indicate that he is being followed and in danger...
On the other hand, the version in the book, in which Athos calls "Aramis, I have been arrested" out of the window to Aramis in the middle of a large crowd makes rather more sense than the version in the film, in which he calls it out as they pass Aramis on the way down the palace stairs, thus not only singling him out and drawing attention to his presence, but doing so at a moment when he is literally within the enemy's reach. (However, these films don't do crowd scenes, doubtless due to lack of budget.)
Apparently in the film the Cardinal's personal guard actually *are* supposed to be Highlanders, presumably for comedy costuming reasons; when on reading the book I discovered that the soldiers are specified to be Swiss, I assumed I had misinterpreted the uniform, and that, like the kilt-wearing Greeks, this was part of the ceremonial uniform of the Swiss guards! But in fact the dialogue does specifically have d'Artagnan introduce himself and Porthos to Mazarin as "Scotsmen" (this is a non-subtitled section, but I have no idea why, as it's absolutely clear), so this was a deliberate change and not cultural blindness on my part. And a change that I very much appreciated was that in the film, Mazarin doesn't return the Queen's diamond to d'Artagnan until *after* his return from England and subsequent capture, which presumably means that he actually gets to keep it this time. (In Dumas, he gets it back earlier, only to be reluctantly obliged to sell the ring a second time in order to raise enough money to bribe the King's executioner to go missing: les diamants,à ce qu’il faut croire, ont leurs sympathies et leurs antipathies comme les hommes ; il paraît que celui-là me déteste :-( For the purposes of the film, they simply kidnap every executioner they can find and don't attempt to bribe them!)
The Roche-l'Abeille sequence, unfortunately, is another of the long sections where the phonetic sub-titling drops out almost entirely, partly because of the distort effect being applied to represent flashback, so I am not a great deal the wiser about how, exactly, Madame de Chevreuse is supposed to have succeeded in seducing Athos in this version. I'm not sure he is, as I had guessed, drunk, but just extremely tired; he tells his 'young guest' to blow out the lights without raising his head from the pillow, she complains that she can't reach the candles at the head of the bed, and he sits up, annoyed, to blow them out himself... only to discover a half-naked woman for some reason in the room with him. (This being continental cinema, they are happy to show a lot more female nudity than British television.) His reaction is to stand up, turn back the sheet, turn his back and offer *her* the bed... at which point she starts flirtatiously stripping off her remaining clothing in a way that is rather wasted since he is pointedly not looking ;-p I think he actually goes for a bottle from a table in the corner, so maybe he has been drinking heavily after all [edit: no, it's a bottle with another candle standing in it, which he subsequently proceeds to blow out. For a man who just wants to go to bed, he seems to have an extortionate number of lighted candles burning in the room!]
I *think* she says that no doubt he considers women to be the work of the Devil, and tells him to say a prayer ("then perhaps you will sleep more soundly than I"). She definitely tells him that she likes his voice and wants him to read a sermon over her. He challenges her as to whether she considers that it would be difficult to lead him into temptation, and the auto-translate cuts in at this point and renders her reply as referring to "people who are so keen on candles", which is not altogether what it sounds like, but in the context of my comment above would I suppose make a certain amount of sense!
At this point when she is in bed, he blows out the candle he is holding, comes back to stand over her with folded arms (and then picks up the discarded stockings and removes them), and tells her that he isn't going to read her a sermon ("what a pity...") But he then adds that he *is* going to talk about other things... which appear to include the scent of roses in August (?heaven-blessed?) and a man who has gone out of his mind (is he saying that she probably now thinks she is talking to a lunatic?) And he kneels to kiss her hands and says other things that I really can't make out, which appear to end with the clear phrase "sweetness in Hell", after which they embrace.
The trouble is that the verbs I think I can hear all have multiple diverging meanings (to keep/leave, to permit/to like); he almost certainly refers to a happy memory, but I'm not clear if he is about to make one, is receiving one, or is relinquishing one. At first hearing I thought this speech might be an allusion to Milady, who is of course the big stumbling-block when it comes to Athos' availability -- he has basically sworn off all women, let alone random seductresses with ulterior motives -- but the more I listen to it the more I doubt that. So despite my best efforts I still have no real idea how this interpretation was intended to play out.
I would, however, not be entirely surprised if the film-makers were 'shipping' them together in middle-age :-)
I'm not sure there is anything actually in the scene between the Comte de La Fère and the Duchesse de Chevreuse that isn't in the book (or indeed taken pretty much verbatim from the book, which is how I'm able to recognise what is being said in the unsubtitled sections), and he responds very respectfully when she throws herself into his arms out of sheer joy, but I had an unexpected feeling of connection between them. And the film does actively add an exchange at the start of the following scene that is *not* in the book, where Aramis opens the conversation by asking Athos why he is smiling in such a risky situation, and Athos responds enigmatically that it is because of something that happened a long time ago...
The deciphering process involved locating and reading the relevant sections from Chapters 79–90 in the French edition on Wikisource (which in the end meant reading almost all of the chapters in question), rewatching with phonetic Russian subtitles and a vast amount of pausing and dictionary-work, and finally watching with auto-translated English titles, once I had worked out how to switch between the two. Auto-translated dialogue being something best put off to the last since the often bizarre results tend to rob the scenes of all emotional impact, and it's easier to deal with in any case once you have a decent idea of what you are actually *hearing* underneath, and hence which words are being silently omitted or wildly misconstrued ;-)
In the case of this section it turns out that for some reason or other considerable chunks of it have no auto-subtitles at all, so it's just as well I was initially watching without -- it would have been very offputting if I'd been relying on the onscreen text to follow the plot, and then it vanished and left me stranded. (Though good subtitles do make an amazingly big difference when it comes to giving the illusion of comprehension; I can be happily watching a foreign film at the BFI in the belief that I am understanding almost every word, when in fact I'm largely back-translating the sense of what I'm reading, as revealed by the abrupt and vertiginous descent into incomprehension the moment something goes wrong with the 'soft-titling' system!)
One of the non-subtitled lines, when I listened to it more carefully, turned out to be Porthos randomly observing that d'Artagnan looked good in a beard, which amused me mightily given my original comments on the scene ("for someone whose moustache has more or less been a permanent trademark since the start of his career, Mikhail Boyarsky actually looks pretty good in a 'full set' :-D)
Boyarsky in a beardIn fact as usual I did get pretty much all of it plot-wise on the first viewing, while the 'crib' filled in most of the longer/more rapid dialogues where I could only catch a few words (but generally sufficient to identify those sections in the novel, e.g. Milo of Croton, who unsurprisingly defeated me entirely when encountered as an unexpected subject of prison conversation :-p) The big changes from the novel are, I think, actually active *improvements*: they have Charles II as a child present with his mother Henrietta-Maria, instead of his (historically accurate) little sister Minette, they have Mazarin's envoys lying to the English Queen in an active attempt to get her out of the country by telling her that the English population have revolted against Parliament to save the King (in Dumas, there is a perplexing lack of purpose for this piece of deliberate misinformation -- why bother, especially when the truth is bound to come out? -- but it makes a lot of sense that Mazarin is simply trying to rid himself unscrupulously of an unwelcome guest!), and, as a result, they have a much better motive for Athos' and Aramis's duel with said envoys, which in the book comes across as Aramis simply being out for a fight at any excuse (he tells Athos that he thinks he saw them laughing behind their backs...) They then have Aramis take the letter referring to Porthos and d'Artagnan from the body of the wounded Jussac, very neatly eliminating the whole convoluted sub-plot with a pitched battle and Raoul accidentally attacking Aramis.
A very notable change is that the film has d'Artagnan and Porthos spending an interminable eighty-three *days* in jail rather than a mere eighty-three hours, which is much more dramatically effective. Although it does raise the question of what Athos and Aramis were doing all that time, and why it took them quite so long to do anything about the fact that their friends appeared to have gone missing :-p And we miss the sequence from the book in which they follow the series of marks and child-like drawings left by d'Artagnan along the way to indicate that he is being followed and in danger...
On the other hand, the version in the book, in which Athos calls "Aramis, I have been arrested" out of the window to Aramis in the middle of a large crowd makes rather more sense than the version in the film, in which he calls it out as they pass Aramis on the way down the palace stairs, thus not only singling him out and drawing attention to his presence, but doing so at a moment when he is literally within the enemy's reach. (However, these films don't do crowd scenes, doubtless due to lack of budget.)
Apparently in the film the Cardinal's personal guard actually *are* supposed to be Highlanders, presumably for comedy costuming reasons; when on reading the book I discovered that the soldiers are specified to be Swiss, I assumed I had misinterpreted the uniform, and that, like the kilt-wearing Greeks, this was part of the ceremonial uniform of the Swiss guards! But in fact the dialogue does specifically have d'Artagnan introduce himself and Porthos to Mazarin as "Scotsmen" (this is a non-subtitled section, but I have no idea why, as it's absolutely clear), so this was a deliberate change and not cultural blindness on my part. And a change that I very much appreciated was that in the film, Mazarin doesn't return the Queen's diamond to d'Artagnan until *after* his return from England and subsequent capture, which presumably means that he actually gets to keep it this time. (In Dumas, he gets it back earlier, only to be reluctantly obliged to sell the ring a second time in order to raise enough money to bribe the King's executioner to go missing: les diamants,à ce qu’il faut croire, ont leurs sympathies et leurs antipathies comme les hommes ; il paraît que celui-là me déteste :-( For the purposes of the film, they simply kidnap every executioner they can find and don't attempt to bribe them!)
The Roche-l'Abeille sequence, unfortunately, is another of the long sections where the phonetic sub-titling drops out almost entirely, partly because of the distort effect being applied to represent flashback, so I am not a great deal the wiser about how, exactly, Madame de Chevreuse is supposed to have succeeded in seducing Athos in this version. I'm not sure he is, as I had guessed, drunk, but just extremely tired; he tells his 'young guest' to blow out the lights without raising his head from the pillow, she complains that she can't reach the candles at the head of the bed, and he sits up, annoyed, to blow them out himself... only to discover a half-naked woman for some reason in the room with him. (This being continental cinema, they are happy to show a lot more female nudity than British television.) His reaction is to stand up, turn back the sheet, turn his back and offer *her* the bed... at which point she starts flirtatiously stripping off her remaining clothing in a way that is rather wasted since he is pointedly not looking ;-p I think he actually goes for a bottle from a table in the corner, so maybe he has been drinking heavily after all [edit: no, it's a bottle with another candle standing in it, which he subsequently proceeds to blow out. For a man who just wants to go to bed, he seems to have an extortionate number of lighted candles burning in the room!]
I *think* she says that no doubt he considers women to be the work of the Devil, and tells him to say a prayer ("then perhaps you will sleep more soundly than I"). She definitely tells him that she likes his voice and wants him to read a sermon over her. He challenges her as to whether she considers that it would be difficult to lead him into temptation, and the auto-translate cuts in at this point and renders her reply as referring to "people who are so keen on candles", which is not altogether what it sounds like, but in the context of my comment above would I suppose make a certain amount of sense!
At this point when she is in bed, he blows out the candle he is holding, comes back to stand over her with folded arms (and then picks up the discarded stockings and removes them), and tells her that he isn't going to read her a sermon ("what a pity...") But he then adds that he *is* going to talk about other things... which appear to include the scent of roses in August (?heaven-blessed?) and a man who has gone out of his mind (is he saying that she probably now thinks she is talking to a lunatic?) And he kneels to kiss her hands and says other things that I really can't make out, which appear to end with the clear phrase "sweetness in Hell", after which they embrace.
The trouble is that the verbs I think I can hear all have multiple diverging meanings (to keep/leave, to permit/to like); he almost certainly refers to a happy memory, but I'm not clear if he is about to make one, is receiving one, or is relinquishing one. At first hearing I thought this speech might be an allusion to Milady, who is of course the big stumbling-block when it comes to Athos' availability -- he has basically sworn off all women, let alone random seductresses with ulterior motives -- but the more I listen to it the more I doubt that. So despite my best efforts I still have no real idea how this interpretation was intended to play out.
I would, however, not be entirely surprised if the film-makers were 'shipping' them together in middle-age :-)
I'm not sure there is anything actually in the scene between the Comte de La Fère and the Duchesse de Chevreuse that isn't in the book (or indeed taken pretty much verbatim from the book, which is how I'm able to recognise what is being said in the unsubtitled sections), and he responds very respectfully when she throws herself into his arms out of sheer joy, but I had an unexpected feeling of connection between them. And the film does actively add an exchange at the start of the following scene that is *not* in the book, where Aramis opens the conversation by asking Athos why he is smiling in such a risky situation, and Athos responds enigmatically that it is because of something that happened a long time ago...