'Life is trouble. Only death is not..'

My first foreign film was Bergman's, 'The Seventh Seal.' In college then, the hairs on the back of my neck were raised throughout the film, a cult favorite of pot smoking bohemians, and lent flaying catholics, as the Knight attempting to escape death (the country is being ravaged by the Black Plague) challenges the Grim Reaper to a game of chess. Oh joy. I escaped permanent cinematic damage and discovered that foreign films didn't need to be so, uh, dark, and enigmatic. I'm taking my nephew, Alex, to his first foreign film in a theater on Saturday. He's 15 and hopefully for him this will be the beginning of a long and beautiful voyage on the swells of the great foreign tides. The film that ultimately defined my collegiate years was a beautiful black and white film adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, 'Zorba the Greek.' Shot on location in Crete, and directed by Michael Cacoyannis this movie transcended stammering youthful philosophical obstacles (what is life etc.) and deposited a riot of passion, suffering, and lust into our 19 year old laps. Buoyed throughout by the sensational music of Mikos Theodorakis and the sirtaki, the Greek dance, the movie was a tour de force for a youthful Alan Bates, and a grizzled Anthony Quinn. For me this was the first time, (yes it was that good), I watched the great and beautiful Greek actor, Irene Papas rendering like, so help-me god, a goddess through the script. She was the 8th wonder. Eff me! I wanted to unabashedly leap from my seat and jump the screen. Instead my cohorts and I found a Greek tavern, a dive in the Tenderloin district of SF, and sucked up ouzo, so what if we were under age, while dancing shoulder to shoulder with whomever smashing plates on the restaurant floor into the wee hours. To Alex, I say the unravelling of foreign films and subtitles (learn to love them!) is like opening a box of chocolates slowly; the quintessential pleasures of a dialog in French; the angst of the Swedes and Germans; the lust and visual beauty of an Almodovar; the film library of the great Kurosawa; the stylized movies of Wong-Kar wai; Truffaut, Dassin, Jean Pierre Melville, Kieslowski etc. etc. etc. All these names mean nothing to you now but someday, hopefully, they might mean as much to you as they do to me.