Tomorrow I’ll be watching Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers in the cinema in Milan. I would have gone earlier, but unusually for a film of this caliber, not a single movie theater in my region (Ticino, the Italian-speaking area of Switzerland) is showing it in English. This is a bit of an annoyance, and not just because, based on comments from friends who have seen it, the Italian dub is not very good.
Now, I come from a multilingual background, having grown up speaking Swedish at home and Italian everywhere else, as a Swedish-speaking Finn raised in Italy. Additionally, my parents made sure to enroll me in a school where we started learning English early, with native speakers teaching it. This, paired with spending my summer holidays in Finland, where subtitles are the norm (except for films meant for very young audiences), made me accustomed to hearing different languages and not having an issue with movies shown in their original version.
Of course, living in Italy, the norm was quite the opposite: dubbing is still widespread, and Italian dubbers are commonly known as the best in the world. That may be true, and I don’t mind seeing the Italian versions on TV if the movie/show is at least a couple of decades old, but the dubbing process itself is no longer what it used to be, according to the people who work in the field. I’ve occasionally been to dubbed screenings for work reasons (once without knowing it, as the invitation said the movie would be shown in English), and the quality leaves a lot to be desired.
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