HE applauds the joint decision by director Tomas Alfredson and his producing colleagues to go with Seance on a Wet Afternoon as the title of Alfredson’s currently-lensing drama.
Alfredson surely understands that a sizable percentage of under-45 Millennials and Zoomers have probably never heard the term “seance”, much less used it in casual conversation. They might also feel challenged and possibly annoyed by the term “wet afternoon.”
The general tendency for decades has been to avoid titles that sound needlessly cultured and cultivated. Hence Taylor Hackford’s 1984 remake of Out of the Past — one of the most poetically haunting movie titles of all time — being dumbed down into Against All Odds.
Seance on a Wet Afternoon, the title of the 62 year-old Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough film, passed muster with 1964 audiences, but education levels were higher back then.
