Italian Translation
Era ora che ti facessi tagliare i capelli.
I wonder why the tense chosen for “faire” is a present tense and not a past one considering that “être” is in passé imparfait.
It’s my understanding that modern French, unlike Italian and Spanish, doesn’t employ the past subjunctive; it uses the present tense instead.
I’m not quite sure of the grammatical reasoning, but the sentence sounds fine as is.
As a note, the imparfait de subjonctif is rarely (if ever) used in spoken language, so, if anything, it would have had to be the passé simple. And even in written french it’s becoming more infrequent.
I’ve have checked a couple of grammar explanations, to see if I could find the appropriate case for this, but I not completely convinced by what I found. Uses of the Subjontif passé are:
- Le subjonctif passé exprime une action incertaine, supposée réalisée au moment où nous nous exprimons. → So not our case
- Utilisé quand l’action principale se deroule avant celle de la frase subourdonée, et qu’elle exprime une dépendence temporelle. → Which doesn’t apply either
According to these definitions, this isn’t a situation in which that verb tense is to be used
Il est temps que, il faut que, il semble que, il se peut que, il vaut mieux que …
These structures are called “expressions impersonnelles”.
The prefixes “im” or “in” are often use to negate a word - probable → improbable, capable → incapable. (similar to “un” or “in” in English: likely → unlikely, capable → incapable.)
So here “impersonnelles” basically means not personnal, and these expressions are so called because “il” does not refer to a person.
In French, “impersonnelles expessions” require the subjunctive.
As @morbrorper and @TheMightyDolphin said, the past subjunctive is hardly ever used in French.
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