Subtitled films from Europe are alive and well in U.S. theatres, as the roster and performance of Chicago-based Music Box Films, with the smash Tell No One and the just-released Séraphine, so compellingly suggest. A new kid on the specialized distributor block—at a time when others have been fleeing the block—Music Box, founded in 2007, is an offshoot of Chi-town’s popular art-house venue The Music Box Theatre.

The Music Box family tree goes something like this: The distribution arm is independently owned and operated by the Southport Music Box Corp., which also owns and operates The Music Box Theatre. The paterfamilias of all this is Southport president and co-founder William G. Schopf, but on the distribution end, “Ed’s doing all the work,” says Schopf.

“Ed” is Ed Arentz, managing director of Music Box Films. Arentz bridges both the distribution and exhibition sectors. He most recently worked for Palm Pictures and continues to book New York’s Cinema Village, longtime home to foreign and indie fare. At Music Box, he is chief scout and dealmaker but works with a small Chicago-based support staff, including Brian Andreotti, who brought Arentz to Schopf’s attention.

But why did Schopf expand from exhibition into distribution? As he explains, “An indie art house is fairly rare these days and it’s a little fragile. We have a terrific staff at the theatre and a great reputation. So I thought that a vertical expansion into distribution, rather than expanding horizontally to run other theatres, presented a good opportunity for me and the staff.”

And there was also a matter of good timing. “Brian [Andreotti] knew Ed because he supplied us with films. But Palm was fading out and Ed became available.”

The good timing extends to Arentz’s view of the theatrical landscape. “The economic issues aside, theatrical for art films has never been stronger,” he says. “More theatres are fully focused on art-house programming or, in the case of the circuits, have available screens in place. There are more venues with arms open to subtitled films.”

The circuits, he elaborates, are building for multi-purpose and in demographically appropriate areas. He cites as examples Bowtie Cinemas in Richmond, Virginia, and new screens in Shreveport, Louisiana.

“You also have a new configuration going on: the not-for-profit theatre that is available for art fare in a downtown area. So there are today different scenarios for an art-house venue to come online,” Arentz reflects.

This change also affects the way distributors distribute. “Maybe a decade or more ago, a company like Sony Pictures Classics would use 25 or 50 prints to circulate their releases. Now you see a hundred or more prints floated,” Arentz notes. And despite all the gloom and doom in the indie world and DVD sector, “the fundamentals are there and the cinemas are prepared to play foreign-language films.”

While Arentz concedes that compelling cinema of any kind—subtitled or not—will find an audience, the focus for Music Box has been on foreign-language cinema, with Europe providing all of their releases so far.

So why this strong embrace of foreign films, when in recent years they had fallen out of favor? Arentz explains: “The trend goes hand-in-hand with globalization and the aging of the U.S. audience. These were the people who were at the heart of the film generation of the ’50s and ’60s who made foreign films so popular. Now they’re back as the leading edge of baby boomers. And they now have more leisure time.”

The film that put Music Box on the map by becoming an art-house phenom was Guillaume Canet’s Tell No One, the most popular foreign-language film of 2008 in the U.S. The thriller, which stars François Cluzet as a pediatrician who becomes involved in the deepening mystery of his beloved wife’s murder, had the advantages of working as a high-quality genre film and having as provenance a best-seller by well-known American author Harlan Coben. Also helpful was the handful of co-stars like Kristin Scott Thomas, Nathalie Baye, Andre Dussolier and Jean Rochefort, who are also familiar to U.S. art-house fans.

While all the usual distribution suspects ignored the film, Music Box closed the deal for Tell No One at the American Film Market. It had a long U.S. run from July 2008 through this past February and grossed $6.2 million. Says Arentz, “We had a slow rollout because everything we do is platform. We couldn’t strike prints fast enough and even had to turn down or postpone bookings. But the idea is to keep costs down. Prints are part of the P&A equation, so you have to find the sweet spot.”

Positive word of mouth proved the most valuable element in making the film a hit, Arentz feels. With the theatrical trophy behind it, he guesses that Tell No One will become the most popular foreign film DVD release in the U.S. for 2009.

Arentz concedes that the company’s next release, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, was a bit of a risk, as it is typical of the kinds of broad comedies, in this case a spoof of the old-fashioned international spy thriller, that play well to the natives but don’t travel well to the U.S. He points to the phenomenon of “reverse discrimination”: The more popular a film is in its native country, the more resistance there is to buy it for the States.



“We took a chance [with the film] and went against the conventional wisdom that this is not the kind of film to import. But we know that our audiences are a lot more catholic in their tastes when it comes to foreign-language films. They’ll accept a wider range. The French living in the States who saw it loved it, but were surprised it got a release here. What the film needed was better reviews in the bigger markets and that didn’t happen.”

OSS, which features comedy star Jean Dujardin as a secret agent enmeshed in murder and intrigue in Cairo, was a box-office sensation in France but less sensational stateside. Still, the film, which boasts lots of charm, easy laughs and Dujardin’s delicious performance, was no money-loser for Music Box, says Arentz.

Music Box may have better luck with its current romantic charmer Shall We Kiss?, directed by Emmanuel Mouret, who co-stars opposite Virginie Ledoyen. A very French and very honest take on lust and love among some upwardly mobile, wholly likeable young people, with an utterly irresistible and believable cast, the film was first seen by Arentz at the 2007 AFM. He didn’t bite and only “warmed to it” when he saw it a second time.

“The film is classically French in its intellectualizing of love and desire and it is also witty, original and has a light touch. I was mainly blown away by the cast and the charm and honesty of the film.” Music Box has a lot of prints on screens, including recent openings in Atlanta and North Carolina, but, Arentz admits, “reviews could have been stronger. The reaction was good but reviews tended to call it a ‘trifle’ or ‘slight,’ in other words damning it with faint praise. Maybe the film is a little too French.”

In its first and only service deal, Music Box is distributing Cannes 2008 Jury Prize winner Il Divo for Chicago-based video company MPI, which handles Music Box’s product on DVD. The film, about the seemingly endless and controversial political career of Italy’s enigmatic and powerful Giulio Andreotti, is a hyperkinetic fever dream that delivers a spectacular performance by Toni Servillo, who received the European Film Award for Best Actor.
The film played strongly in New York and L.A. and has just opened in other major markets. Says Arentz, “Considering that Italian cinema here in the States has taken a back seat to the French, we will do quite nicely.”

Music Box’s latest big coup is the acquisition of the exquisite period piece Séraphine, starring Yolande Moreau as the real-life humble provincial servant and self-taught naïve painter Séraphine de Senlis (think an early-20th-century Susan Boyle who paints rather than sings) and Ulrich Tukur as the German ex-pat critic and collector who discovers her and becomes her patron.

After Music Box acquired the film in late 2008, it was honored a few months later with seven Césars, including Best Film and Best Actress for Moreau’s remarkable performance. Arentz, of course, expresses pleasure at such luck.

Music Box opened the film on June 5 in New York and L.A. and will gradually expand it. Arentz calls himself “guardedly optimistic” and hopes to play the picture into the fall. Other distributors had a chance at Séraphine when it played Toronto last fall, but Music Box jumped. Reviews should be strong and hopefully those other key elements will kick in.

Staying on its European tear but crossing another border, Music Box recently acquired two German films. Arentz calls the award-winning Cloud 9 (Wolke 9), directed by Andreas Dresen, “groundbreaking because of its depiction of the sexuality of people in their late 60s and 70s. It’s a love story presented very matter-of-factly and explicitly.” Just how “explicit,” Arentz won’t elaborate, but he admits, “We’ll probably go out unrated.” The film “insists that sagging flesh is a thing of beauty. It tells a moving story and shows that these elderly people have erotic lives.”

Music Box did the deal for the suspenseful adventure film North Face (Nordwand) at the recent Berlin Film Festival. Based on a true story and co-starring Ulrich Tukur (also featured in Séraphine), North Face is about the 1936 competition to climb the most dangerous rock face in the Alps. It was Nazi propaganda at the time that urged Germany’s Alpinists to conquer the unclimbed north face of the Swiss massif—the Eiger. Two reluctant German climbers take the dare and begin their daring ascent.

Arentz calls the film “really gripping” and “an interesting metaphor of the impact of the Nazis.” It was a U.K. review for the picture that first sparked Arentz’s interest.
The high quality of the films Music Box acquires is indisputable, but how does the company meet the challenge of making audiences aware in so charged and crowded an environment? Arentz admits, “It’s problematic. Print advertising in daily and weekly papers is more expensive, even though it may be delivering a smaller audience or readership. Plus, more and more critics that people are familiar with are getting laid off. But because the audiences for our kind of films are more traditional in their media sources, the papers work better for our films. Our films are also review-driven and these reviews often also end up online. But the fact that film critics on the Net are less familiar and sometimes more amateur is changing the dynamic a bit.”

Music Box’s experience with Tell No One proved a lesson. Explains Arentz, “It was illustrative that reviews and word of mouth remain the most important things.” Tell No One was driven by “the traditional thing of people talking to their friends,” he notes. For this reason, Music Box is a big believer in doing lots of advance screenings to get the word out. And, adds Arentz, “if a film works, it almost doesn’t matter about the advertising.”

Schopf, also wearing his exhibitor’s hat, cites an interesting difference between U.S. and overseas audiences. “We’re fairly unique and isolated here because, except for some exceptions like some major markets, our people here are just not that used to coming into contact with other cultures in a meaningful way. So foreign-language films here can mean a harder sell than in Australia or Europe.”

Not just in the theatrical game, Music Box gets all rights for the U.S. and sometimes Canada is included. In the case of French films, rights have usually already been sold for Quebec, but Music Box can opt for English-speaking Canada.

The focus is always on theatrical, but Music Box delivers to all other formats, whether DVD and Blu-ray, cable and even emerging electronic delivery formats (although the prospect of watching the visually and aurally dazzling widescreen spectacle Il Divo on a cell-phone boggles the mind).

With so many films out there at so many festivals and markets where so many often aggressive and deep-pocketed corporate-owned competitors vie for art-house product, Arentz appears to have his work cut out for him. But that’s not quite how he sees it: “The hard part is marketing the damn thing; the fun part is finding it.” In fact, Arentz concedes that “the trick is to find films that are easier to market, if not necessarily better.”

The Music Box lesson for these distressed times—whether the product is subtitled or not—might be: Work hard, keep it fun and lean, but get lucky.