After watching way too many "Captain America: Civil War" clips than is good for one's health, my natural next step was, of course, to watch them in French, a language which amplifies all the feels in a film that is already a delightful effusion of feels.
As I drew upon my shamefully shallow reserves of French listening abilities, what struck me the most was how the characters addressed each other, particularly in their use of the formal or informal version of the English "you." One of the confusing yet wonderfully nuanced attributes of French is the existence of two different ways to say "you"; in general, tu is informal and vous is formal.
Tu is used between friends and family, while vous is used between strangers, work acquaintances, bosses, etc. To vouvoyer someone generally signifies respect, but also implies an emotional distance between the speakers. Tu indicates intimacy, but to tutoyer inappropriately can be a sign of disrespect. The societal norms regarding the tu/vous distinction varies greatly by time in history, local culture and personal beliefs.
Working between the dubbed and subbed trailers (I've chosen to follow the dubbed version where they contradict), I could identify the following patterns:
- Bucky and Steve are on tu terms, even when Steve is uncertain about the state of Bucky's mind and when he has Bucky chained by way of an enormous magnet. Their bromance is thus proven by French lexical patterns, and it makes my little fangirl heart weep with joy.
- When Natasha is warning Steve to not interfere, she uses tu; when Steve replies, asking if she's going to arrest him, he uses vous. Natasha's tu could be either a sign of her generally flippant manner of speech, or she could be using tu to appeal to the friendship they've developed during and since "The Winter Soldier." To have Steve use vous could either be in tribute to his early 20th-century origins, or to suggest that Steve is pushing Natasha away so that she won't be harmed in his quest to save Bucky.
- I think Falcon uses tu with Steve — not entirely certain.
- Tony uses vous with Natasha when he warns her "they're coming for you," which seems inconsistent to me — but this was the subbed, not dubbed version.
- Finally, we come to Steve and Tony. In all the dubbed scenes, they address each other as vous, even when Tony quips "Sometimes I want to punch you in your perfect teeth." Considering Tony's disrespectful nature, he'd be likely to use the familiar tu; his use of vous for Cap can be seen as a sign of respect, despite the circumstances. Alternatively, their stubborn use of vous enhances the sense of the rift that has grown between them; the cold and distant vous embodies the wariness with which they approach each other. It makes my little fangirl heart weep with sorrow.
Of course, I could be reading too deeply into this; the tu/vous distinction, as I mentioned, is often fickle and transient. But it is certain that he who translates Marvel movies to French possesses the power to define relationships between characters, which is always fun to muse about.
