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Since it is the sequel to a modern classic – an iconic film that managed to introduce no end of quotes and terms to the cultural lexicon – you could assume that The Devil Wears Prada 2 wouldn’t have to work much to attract an audience. But this is where you would be wrong.
For example, someone unfamiliar with the first film might wonder if, since the title invokes Satan, it might actually be a horror. Or maybe the name scans as an angry indie documentary about the role of designer clothing within this period of late-stage capitalism. And so it makes much more sense to do what the Vietnamese have done and simply call the film The Woman Who Loves Luxury Goods 2.
Isn’t that perfect? The Woman Who Loves Luxury Goods 2 is an almost perfect name, because it instantly lets the viewer know that a) there is a woman in this film, b) the woman loves luxury goods and c) this is a sequel. True, you might be able to argue that the film isn’t specific enough about which woman loves luxury goods (the statement is equally true of many women in the film), and maybe that it isn’t quite specific enough. After all, the title could work just as well for Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Confessions of a Shopaholic or Sex and the City or The Bling Ring or Marie Antoinette. But this is merely a quibble.
In fact, The Woman Who Loves Luxury Goods 2 deserves to be added to the canon of Films That Had a Better Title in a Different Language. Luckily for us, it is a huge canon. There are a wealth of films that, for whatever reason, have had their names altered for different markets. For the most part, the new titles have always improved on them.
For instance, the title Bad Santa manages to sell about 80% of what the film sets out to achieve, but there is still a lingering vagueness. Is the Santa of Bad Santa morally untrustworthy, or merely inept? Luckily the Czech Republic managed to fix this, by giving it a title that translates to Santa Is a Pervert. Instantly, you know exactly what sort of film you’re going to see.
There are others. Germany has a great record with this, renaming Annie Hall as The Urban Neurotic and Airplane! as The Incredible Journey in a Crazy Airplane. It also deserves a mention for renaming Die Hard With a Vengeance as Die Slowly, Now More Than Ever, which is the closest any film has come to sounding like a Covid-era building society commercial.
As evidenced by The Woman Who Loves Luxury Goods 2, though, Asia is where you’ll find the really good stuff. In China’s hands alone, Deep Impact became Heaven and Earth Great Collision, Knocked Up became One Night, Big Belly and Pretty Woman became the unimpeachable I Will Marry a Prostitute to Save Money. Admittedly the country does not have a perfect record of this – its decision to rename The Full Monty as Six Naked Pigs might have disappointed fans of naked pigs – but you have to admit that it’s good.
However, you could argue that some countries take this a step too far. Although Thelma and Louise is a fairly generic name for a film (who are Thelma and Louise, and why should we care about them?), it is far better than the full Mexican title, which features a subtitle that translates to An Unexpected Ending. Clearly, that explains far too much about the plot. It would be like renaming The Sixth Sense as The Boy Who Saw Ghosts, or The Usual Suspects as Kevin Spacey Was Keyser Söze All Along.
It is worth pointing out that the most widely quoted instance of these is actually not quite true. For a while a myth persisted that, in some countries, the James Bond films were known as Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Perhaps the myth gained traction because it is the most succinctly perfect distillation of 007 ever put to words, but the fact is that no film ever bore this title. Instead, the term was invented by an Italian journalist who wrote about the character in 1962. Nevertheless, it was enough to spawn both a song of the same name on the Thunderball soundtrack and the title of the 2005 Robert Downey Jr movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Also, let’s not forget that this works both ways. After all, we are the ones who took something as intriguing and expansive as La Vie d’Adèle and overloaded it with so much pretension that we ended up calling it Blue Is the Warmest Colour, which sounds like something Nicole Kidman would whisper during an incomprehensible perfume ad. And the 1998 Swedish romcom Show Me Love sounds impossibly generic, until you realise that it had a much more interesting title in Fucking Åmål.
Still, for now let’s celebrate this for what it is. Should the Devil Wears Prada make enough money to warrant another sequel, let’s just do the decent thing and call it The Woman Who Loves Luxury Goods 3. At least we will all know where we stand with that.
English (US)