i do need to see this! the film critic community is grumbling that studio hype produced that best film nomination (voters were sent boxes of chocolates along with their screening tapes, ads have saturated magazines and newspapers etc.) but Lasse Hallstrom is a favorite filmmaker of mine, and I love Judi Dench, Johnny Depp and Juliet Binoche (though I feel she has been somewhat miscast in some of her more recent films). The whole pagan/aphrodisiac plot line sounds right up my alley.

The whole "fake foreign film" trend has been going on for some time. Braveheart, Schindler's List, etc. Bottom line: American audiences love films set in other countries; they don't like to read subtitles. Stupid but true. They can barely handle dialect films. I even saw a film in English set in Glasgow that had subtitles! If a film is financed by Hollywood studios, then those producers are marketing to the American audience. And they are also obligated to hire actors within their own employment/union system.

Choosing Johnny Depp over a French actor is no stranger than choosing an American actor to play a "foreign" character in the same sort of film, if you think about it. As long as the actor can handle the accent (something the casting director and dialect coaches have a part in) I see no problem with it. Mr. Depp is a fine actor and has handled some tricky accents in the past. Many American and English actors are wonderful at foreign accents (Meryl Streep, Bob Hoskins, Ian Holm, Benicio del Toro); some of them are awful. Some "foreign" actors are terrible at American accents (Arnold Schwarzenegger; then again I don't consider him an actor).