It's clearly been marketed as ...
My experience is this happens all too often, especially with very creative ("genre-busting") foreign films, but occasionally even with domestic mainstream features.
And trailers -which are made by completely different people than those that made the film- are so frequently awful (giving away the entire plot, showing
all the good parts, giving the wrong impression what the film is about, etc.) that I use them for nothing more than a guide to which films to research further, not as a guide to which films to actually see.
And the misdirection isn't just a PITB for viewers. The mis-marketing is likely to show up even in IMDb listings as an arguably incorrect genre classification, particularly if the mis-marketing effort also controls the film's website. And worst of all, some films become
permanently mis-branded, so the next couple generations faces the same misinformation, and the film
never gets recognized as it should, not even when the "new genre" it invented catches on and becomes common.
My sad experience also is the director basically can't do anything about it. If the director objects right away, the film simply doesn't get distributed at all. If the director later refuses to cooperate in the mis-marketing campaign, at that point they're sabotaging the attendance of their own film, and are faced with the dismal choice of either folks seeing it for the wrong reasons, or folks not seeing it at all.
That's why I generally ignore the marketing, and instead rely on word of mouth, a few reviewers I trust, knowledge of the programming habits of the theaters I frequent, and even consolidating websites (although it's sometimes hard to avoid the spoilers there).
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TheHungryAndAngryShow
9 years ago
I cannot agree with you more. Personally I do not watch trailers for films I plan to see, and I try to read as little as I can about any films I haven't seen. Sometimes I will scan an article to see if the subject matter is appealing, or watch a bit of a trailer to see if the cinematography appeals to me. But generally I prefer going in as blind as I can while still choosing to see movies I feel will appeal to me. Since mainly I like odd, offbeat topics, horror, foreign, and disturbing, it's pretty easy to tell what is going to fit into that genre. Short descriptions are great as it rarely gives too much plot. I trust certain theaters to give spoiler free descriptions most of the time. This film was unfortunately the only trailer Lincoln Center was playing, and IFC Center was also playing it for a couple weeks during a time I was at both of these theaters. So I had no choice but to sit through the trailer at least a dozen times. The same happened with The Babadook. By the time I had watched The Babadook trailer a dozen times I had figured out the whole plot of the movie, and I was pretty spot on this time. Slightly ruined it for me, but better to be right then led astray and find out the film is nothing like the trailer.
The Duke Of Burgundy trailer is so far from what the movie is about it was a real let down. Had I walked into this much more blind to what it was going to be I may have been less critical of it, but trailers can really set you up for disappointment. Obviously if you just stumbled upon this film you might find it fun or charming or entertaining, but when it is thrown at you as a sexy hot indie film, and you get something completely different you don't exactly feel like things have been represented fairly. The unfortunate thing about how humans process things is that we come to a situation with expectations, usually set up by others. Most of us are not very good at completely tuning these out, and this was a situation where I expected much more than I got.
I remember hearing Larry Cohen talk about his film Bone, which he says was marketed as a blacksploitation film, when it was meant as a comedy, a social satire on how white people viewed blacks at the time. But the fact that it was marketed as a drama, or horror movie, made no sense and the audiences that went to see that kind of a movie were sorely disappointed. Thankfully I saw Bone with little knowledge of what I was seeing, I was familiar with Larry Cohen's work and knew I liked his stuff, and knew well enough to not "expect" something from him other than the unexpected. I wish there were more filmmakers who had that kind of artistry nowadays.
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