Did 'Mr. Wang' pull a Tonto??
According to TVtropes.org, Native American actors, when directed to say something in their own language, said whatever they felt like, “often saying obscene or insulting things about the director, the other actors, etc.” This led to Native American audience members laughing at inappropriate moments during screenings. Li Yong, on the contrary, said something overly complimentary that was equally misunderstood by his directors and co-actors. I’ve heard the directors recount in various interviews how impressed Yong said he was with Francesca Cuttica’s Mandarin ability—“Genius!” is the English word they said he used. My Chinese graduate students had quite a different estimation of her ability. Perhaps Li was simply being polite.
When asked to respond to the film, one of my students suggested that Li’s description of Cuttica as a genius is an example of “the manner of Chinese communication [that] is always not quite direct”, while another wrote, “I want to say to the director that the actress’s Chinese is very bad, so please change the actress. Mr. Li said that she speaks very good Chinese. Maybe that’s a way of irony”. Several of them admitted that “the sentences she uttered don’t make any sense, except for “Wang xiansheng”—“Mr. Wang”. Another common sentiment was that “she just imitates the pronunciation of Chinese words and we feel it is ridiculous”. One student noticed that this has an impact on the plot: “As native speakers, we can’t understand what the interpreter said, so how can the alien?”
Several of the students acknowledged Cuttica’s acting ability: “I believe the actress has worked really very hard. However, her Chinese is still terrible”, wrote one, while another noted that, “Even though her Chinese pronunciation is very poor, she still acts very calmly and professionally”. One student was impressed that the actress learned so much Chinese “in such a short time”, and admitted that “maybe we can’t speak Italian very well in that short time”. That is entirely possible, but then, these students will not appear in a movie portraying Chinese-Italian interpreters.
One student complained that the film doesn’t show “a sense of responsibility towards work and a respect for Chinese”, and I agree—the film could be interpreted as an 80-minute public service announcement about Italy’s need for competent Mandarin teachers. I’m not aware of a Chinese film that is guilty of trying to pass off a major character’s language level as being so much higher than it really is. I suspect that if a Chinese film featured a Chinese-Italian or Chinese-English interpreter who could not be understood by native speakers of Italian or English, it would receive quite a bit of negative press. One of my students made this observation: “The Chinese [language] can spread out in the other planets but the native earth people can’t speak it very well. This phenomenon is a little bit ironic”. One of the directors has made the same point--that this alien learns this widely-used language, and yet few can understand him. It’s too bad that the directors misunderstood what Yong told them. That their praise for Cuttica’s Mandarin ability can go unchallenged shows just how little people in general, and the director and Cuttica in particular, know about Mandarin. The film would have been better without this additional ironic overlay.