Marketing Kisses to Americans

We lived in Ireland for about two years. While there, we had plenty of guests come and visit us. We usually met them at the airport and took a cab into town. The guests and Julie would pile into the back seat, and I’d sit up front with the driver. I’d chat with the driver about football or traffic or whatever.

On more than one occasion, our newly-arrived guests would be baffled by the conversation. They couldn’t understand a single thing the taxi driver was saying. They were inevitably from the north side of Dublin, and had a particularly thick accent. Having lived in the city for a year, our ears had become familiar with the accent, so we could usually have a conversation.

While I was in New York, I watched a couple of movies at the most excellent Angelika Film Center. I saw a trailer for the Irish movie Kisses:

It’s about two kids from the north side of Dublin who run away from home.

Despite the fact that the kids are speaking English, the trailer is subtitled. And, amusingly, the (I assume) American distributor got a word in the trailer wrong. At about the 56-second mark, according to the subtitles, one of the leads says (in response to Stephen Rea, apparently channeling Bob Dylan) “we’re actually running away”. In truth, what she says is “we’re after running away”. ‘After’ here is used to indicate the immediate past, in place of, according to Wikipedia, the usual pluperfect usage.

The movie was released in Ireland about a year and a half ago. I suspect that the film’s distributors are hoping that this movie will be another Once. It’s interesting to compare the original Irish trailer to the North American one:

It feels a little more sinister, doesn’t it? A little rougher around the edges. You can also hear some other dialogue without subtitles.

I was also amused to see an open-air ice rink featured in the movie:

These synthetic ice rinks have popped up around Christmas time in Dublin over the last decade. When we lived in Dublin’s IFC neighbourhood, they laid one directly outside our apartment’s door. When we lived there, Ireland had zero ice arenas, so it was amusing to watch the kids try to figure out this new thing called ‘skating’, and on the less-forgiving fake ice as well.

Film-making is such a marathon. It must be a chore for the director and performers to return to promoting the movie more than two years after finishing it.