Mickybo and Me: A Cinematographic Adaptation for an International Audience

Abstract

Mickybo and Me, directed by the Northern Irish Terry Loane in 2004, falls into the category of initiatory tales that reveal a society in crisis. It is a rite-of-passage film that takes place during the ‘Troubles’. The script presents two eight-year-old Protestant and Catholic boys from Belfast in the 1970s, who become and remain friends, despite bigotry and violence. Notwithstanding the progressive contemporaneity of the original scenario and its attempts to render characterizations in a nuanced way, my contention here is that the representations of the Protestant and Catholic communities, as well as the representation of the so-called innocent childhood, are rather safely stereotyped in the film. I will propose that this is perhaps most evident where the scripted language is concerned. In fact, it is clear that the dialogue in the film, an adaptation of a play by Owen McCafferty first published in 1998, has sometimes been toned down, thus rendering the stereotypification all the more simplistic in its legibility; something that is all the more marked in the French subtitles, although perhaps surprisingly less so in the dubbed version. Subtitling and dubbing films are very difficult tasks and are subject to certain constraints; with general concessions, namely, that a line of subtitles should not exceed 32 alphabetical characters for legibility on a television screen and that they should not be sustained for more than four or five seconds (Bellos, 2012: 149). Where dubbing is concerned, the synchronization of the words spoken by the indigenous actors and the lip movements of the original performers add significantly to this difficulty. Of course, these technical requirements determine the choice of words, but I would like to foreground in this chapter how the language used is also crucially influenced by the target culture.