Cast your eyes over the film release schedule for the coming weeks, and there are some prospects which stick out immediately - and others that don't. Whatever their merits as movies, Choke and Quarantine are grabby enough as titles, at least, setting you up (in theory at least) for a gripping night at the flicks.
But I fear the same can't be said for Conversations with my Gardener, a low-key French comedy with Daniel Auteuil. The picture it summons is one of Auteuil having lengthy pow-wows with some arthritic old duffer about whether it's the right time of year to prune the hydrangeas. Possibly they get the strimmer out; maybe an apple falls from a tree at some point. Honestly, they might as well have called it Regardez la peinture sécher (that's "Come and Watch Paint Dry" in French).
The documentary Tis Autumn – The Search for Jackie Paris seems likely to prove an equally hard sell for whichever poor souls have been paid to market it, and that's even if you've heard of the mightily obscure jazz session vocalist we're meant to be combing the globe for. To the motto "never judge a book by its cover", it would be sensible to add "never judge a film by its suicidally unprepossessing title", but in both cases we're kidding ourselves – we judge these things by their covers and titles all the time, particularly if we're paying.
Any effort to enthuse cinemagoers about the heady peaks of serious Japanese art cinema, say, faces a hurdle even taller than the films' scarce availability, even more arduous than their running times - and that's the failure of English translation to make them sound remotely interesting. I could tell you that Mikio Naruse's 1960 feature Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki is a devastating masterpiece but you're bound to remain a little sceptical when you find it translates as When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. (Compared with When Gerbils Attack, or When Good Robots Go Bad, that's really not setting the dramatic stakes too high.) All the delicate nuances of Yasujiro Ozu's films tend to get reduced in their title summations to almost self-parodic guff about foliage and seasons (Autumn for the Kohayagawa Family; A Story of Floating Weeds). These titles do not make a reviewer's life easy.
Of course, a not-very-catchy title doesn't make much difference if you've got the promotional cash the likes of Quantum of Solace has to chuck about. They could simply release the next one as Untitled 23rd Bond Project and the multiplexes would still be heaving. But we might gently suggest that arthouse film companies, with their more precarious business models, have a rethink in these tough times, and prune out the more soporific references to what deciduous leaves do in the late months of the year.
This isn't to say they should con us by claiming Ozu made a film called Die! Die! Titty Rodriguez. I'm serious: Artificial Eye did a nice job releasing Abdel Kechiche's excellent La graine et le mulet under the snappy Couscous rather than its impressively unenticing American title, The Secret of the Grain. Lo and behold, it was a box-office sleeper hit here. And yet they have a film coming out on Boxing Day called, would you believe it, Gardens in Autumn. My money's on The Sound of Music and the turkey leftovers. Will they ever learn? What are your favourite boring titles?
