You learn a lot about movies when you see how other people approach them. It isn’t out of the ordinary that I would watch something like the Jennifer Love Hewitt vehicle The Truth About Love, what is out of the ordinary was where I was: in an apartment in Amman, Jordan.
The plot is a standard one for the romantic comedy: Guy loves his best friend’s wife, sends anonymous Valentine’s card, wife thinks card is from husband, decides to pose as anonymous admirer to husband, comeuppance is given, best friend and wife get together.
The Saudi Arabian cable channel MBC 2 broadcast across the Middle East and runs non-stop movies, mostly from Hollywood. This being a television station from a very conservative country, the films are heavily edited any trace of sex, drugs or foul language out of them so that an R rated movie here could easily get a PG rating for the censor’s-cut. It may seem strange that MBC 2 would broadcast a movie whose central conceit is adultery. But here’s the real strange thing: the edits actually improve the movie.
In one scene, Hewitt makes only the slightest move forward before the scene and the music jumps forward to Hewitt walking down the hall. What did the couple do? What did they say to each other? In the theatrical version I’m sure we see all this, but add a few insinuations and the interpretation deepens. When movies get lazy and spell everything out, the audience gets lazy.
I’m reminded of a technique used in the fourth Harry Potter movie. When Harry must steal something from a dragon, we get a few requisite shots of how hard this might be. As Harry flies towards it in a last-minute attempt to steal a magic egg, we see the dragon, Harry’s face, a gasping crowd and then… the next scene. Harry is safe again in Hogwarts, holding the egg aloft to the joy of his classmates. A lesser film would’ve given us at least a five minute CGI battle with the dragon, but since this is gone, we are left to wonder just how the boy wizard did it.
Had these censor edits been made in earnest, maybe the movie would be regarded as a quaint cult classic where the aspiring, but inexperienced, filmmakers were just learning about the jump cut and ended up making something better than they intended.
Jaws launched the career of Spielberg in part because it wasn’t just a movie about a giant shark, but a movie that famously didn’t show a giant shark when it could have. This is due in part to the fact that the mechanical shark used for shooting kept breaking down, so Spielberg was coming up with ways to shoot around the shark while still showing what the shark can do. Hitchcock knew this too. Watch the shower scene in Psycho; you never see the knife actually stab. We get quick glimpses of what’s happening, we can hear what’s happening, but we can’t see it. The brain fills in the rest and most times, a person’s imagination will be worse than anything they will see on a screen.
Though The Truth About Love is neither of these movies, it’s interesting to see how it benefits from the “less is more” presentation. We see romantic leads kissing so often that it’s never given a second thought until it doesn’t happen.
The most striking example of this is the ending. We expect to see the requisite true love’s kiss and we do… in the American version. But when Saudi TV audiences watch Hewitt and Dougray Scott move in to smooch, the credits immediately begin. It’s an ending I didn’t expect and had it been made intentionally it could’ve been regarded as one of the most subversive endings in the last decade; sure to be inspire a few abruptly ended imitators.
As it stands, The Truth About Love is conventional. Conventional in the way that I dislike most romantic comedies because there’s nothing I haven’t seen before. But when some television executive orders anything remotely offensive to a largely Muslim audience to be removed; there’s something new.
I’d imagine that somewhere in the MBC studios is a collection of all the clips exorcized from the movies, similar to the final scenes of Cinema Paradiso, waiting to be found and strung together of montage of kissing, cursing and everything else that most audiences are far to dulled to appreciate anymore.
