This morning’s screening of Ken Loach‘s Looking for Eric, a mildly engaging well-made film about a British middle-aged postal worker and soccer fan that isn’t likely to see U.S. distribution, reminded me of the difficulty I’ve had in the past in deciphering rural British, Irish and Scottish accents in films. The Manchester accents in Loach’s drama make the dialogue (in the early portions at least) nearly impossible to understand. The obvious remedy would be subtitles. I’m a huge fan, for example, of Paul Greengrass‘s Bloody Sunday, but I never really understood what was being said all around until the subtitled DVD came out.
