AMERICANIZING AN ‘EMPIRE’

There is ample precedent for one culture borrowing a movie from another, like a cup of flour or a half-dozen eggs. A gentle French comedy called “The Toy” from a few seasons back became an American comedy with Richard Pryor and Jackie Gleason.

The bare-bones plot was the same; inevitably, the ambiance was drastically different. But the Americanized version was a box-office success. Gene Wilder’s “The Woman in Red” was a rendering of a French original; the American classic “The Magnificent Seven” derived from Kurosawa’s classic “Seven Samurai.”

Nevertheless, the tentative plan to do an Americanized remake of Denys Arcand’s French-Canadian film “The Decline of the American Empire” seems, if quite understandable, fraught with peril to the health of a fine work.

It is one of this year’s five Academy Award nominees for best foreign-language film in a strong field. (Only the Austrian entry, “ ‘38,” a drama based on the 1938 Nazi takeover in Vienna, is not playing commercially and as yet has no American distributor.)

“Decline” continues a long local run. It is one of the most thoughtful, appealing, well-performed films I have seen in some time. It sets up a subtle uneasiness, like distant thunder or a chilly breeze on an Indian summer afternoon.

In synopsis it might or might not sound so engrossing and provoking: Eight academic historians of one degree or another talk about their lives and the life span of American civilization, of which they are indubitably a part.

The thing is that most of the talk is about sex and love, either or both in varying mixtures. The talk is more graphic than the images, but it is so accurately heard that it seems to have been acquired from eavesdropping and phone taps.

The tangled relationships among the historians--some not revealed until the one long day of the film’s action--were obviously central to the appeal of an American-made edition. Arcand, a brisk, mustachioed, articulate man who himself trained as a historian, gave Paramount an option to pursue the adaptation.

Even now, said Arcand who was in Los Angeles last week in preparation for the Oscar festivities, David Giler has been in Thailand where he could work in isolation on the script. Giler has been author or co-author on films as various as “Myra Breckenridge,” “Parallax View” and “Alien.”

Ned Tanen, the principal proponent of the project, has been disarmingly forthright, Arcand reports: “He says, ‘We’re in the business to make money, not art.’ I worry when people talk too much about art; I’m never sure they mean it.”

Tanen also has been clear that the remake would have to be done on a modest budget by Hollywood studio standards. “He says that there are six major roles, and that if you tried to put a star in each one,” Arcand said, “the budget would be $17 million or $20 million before you did anything else. Impossible.”

There are actually eight or nine strong parts, and Arcand built an ensemble of wonderfully trained French-Canadian actors who, he says, “work all the time--on stage, in television, films, commercials. They don’t make a lot in any one field, but they have comfortable lives.” They are almost totally unfamiliar to American viewers, but as is often the case with foreign-language films, their unfamiliarity becomes a strength. They seem to be the characters, not actors creating the characters.

What would solve the problem, Tanen and Arcand agree, is to create a comparable ensemble of performers willing to work for reduced salaries in exchange for a percentage of the film, thus making it financially viable. The lure would be the words and the relationships.

The peril lies in the possible sacrifice of Arcand’s underlying text, which is a speculation that American civilization may have peaked, as Arcand has said, in the glorious exertions of World War II. The decline, as he has also said, can take centuries, but the downslope is discernible.

The slope may be detectable, he appears to be saying in his film, in the volatile relations between men and women, in an increasingly frenzied and ever less satisfying pursuit of happiness, defined here as sexual happiness. (This, despite the evidence from the characters’ own lives, as Arcand invents them, that there remains a large and echoing emptiness where love ought to be, and the characters know it.)

“The Decline of the American Empire” has other echoes. It hints of the films of Jean-Luc Godard in its willingness to address so large a theme as the history of a civilization, and to let the characters talk, then talk some more. Arcand, 48, admits he came to film in the days of the New Wave, of which Godard was an adornment.

But Arcand is less didactic and far less indifferent to the needs of the audience. Godard sometimes seems contemptuous of the viewer. Arcand wants to beguile the audience into thinking about what is on his mind. It is the thoughtfulness of the film that you would hate to see imperiled by the obvious exploitability of the carnal conversations.

The excitement of the film is the degree to which it feels observed rather than invented. The war between the sexes has come a far piece from James Thurber, yet the sense of the conflict remains, and there is a feeling among Arcand’s women that they are still objects of conquest, not helpmates.

For all its thoughtfulness, the film is marvelously and slyly funny. Throughout the long first sequence, the men are making dinner while the women are off at a health club, keeping in shape.

The cultural differences are so subtle and slight that there seems nothing to translate except the language, yet it is reasonable to fear that much could be lost in the translation of a masterful film.

Arcand has first refusal on the project. If he likes Giler’s script, he will direct the American version himself. (He is perfectly bilingual.) If he doesn’t, someone else will.