The Toronto Sun

February 28, 1998, Saturday, Final EDITION

ARKIN'S LATEST OFFERING HAS A DISTINCT ACCENT VETERAN AMERICAN ACTOR IN 
BRAZILIAN MOVIE

BYLINE: STEVE JAMES, REUTERS

Actor Alan Arkin has been nominated for Academy Awards, but never won. Now he has a chance to share 
in an Oscar -- for a Brazilian movie nominated for best foreign film.

Brazil's entry for an Academy Award, Four Days In September, features Arkin as a U.S. ambassador 
kidnapped in Rio de Janeiro in 1969 by leftists.


The film, directed by Bruno Barreto, tells a real-life story that occurred during Brazil's right-wing 
dictatorship.

For Arkin, a 35-year veteran of Hollywood and Broadway, the movie was a challenge -- especially since it 
was filmed in Portuguese with English subtitles.

Brooklyn-born Arkin, 63, has done his share of accents, including a Soviet submarine captain in the 1966 
Oscar-nominated The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.

But Four Days was something new.

"The challenge for me was the Portuguese, which is a brutally difficult language to speak, and I'm pretty 
good at languages," he said. "This was harder than anything I've ever had to do.

"There are sounds in it which are almost impossible to make. What made it even more difficult was not 
only that I had to speak Portuguese in Rio, but I had to speak Portugal Portuguese in Rio and have a very 
specific accent."

'STRAINED AND ISOLATED STATE'

But not knowing the language well while the director, actors and the production crew were speaking it 
around him actually helped him play a better kidnap victim.

"It helped me because I was playing someone who was not Brazilian. I was playing someone who was in a 
strained and isolated state, so it helped everything."

Arkin did not speak at all in his other Oscar-nominated role, as a deaf mute in 1968's The Heart Is A 
Lonely Hunter.

In Four Days, he is held in the dark or forced to wear dark glasses when his youthful captors speak to him 
and threaten him with death.

Over time, he reveals he is not their perceived symbol of Yankee imperialism. And while he does not 
sympathize with their cause of overthrowing Brazil's dictatorship, he at least understands it.

"The surprising and wonderful thing about this film is that you care about everyone in the film, understand 
everybody's point of view. You don't have to know anything about politics or particularly care about 
politics to be able to follow and have a feeling for the events."

DRAWN TO AMBIGUITY

Other nominees for best foreign film at the March 23 Academy Awards are Beyond Silence from Germany, 
Character from the Netherlands, Secrets Of The Heart from Spain and The Thief from Russia.

Befitting an actor perhaps best known for his portrayal of Yossarian in the 1970 satirical film, Catch-22, 
Arkin is drawn to projects with "any kind of ambiguity."

Taken to European movies as a child by his father, Arkin recalls films " where you would laugh one minute 
and cry the next and not know whether something was a comedy or a tragedy... I guess I grew up thinking 
that's the way movies should be."

A complex man who has acted on stage and screen, directed, written children's books and composed songs, 
Arkin is self-effacing when asked how he would like to be remembered.

"I'd like to know who I am, but I don't know what I am. There's only a couple of things I do in my life that I 
enjoy unreservedly. And I guess highest of those is playing the guitar."