The sound of SILENZIO

He could be K. coming to the Castle or Jonathan Harker paying a visit to Count Dracula. Just a man on an unusual sort of business trip. But the ever-so-cordial Mr. Gilderoy (Toby Jones, offering countless gradations of tempered disgruntlement) seems even less assuming than those unlucky literary forbearers. He is an English sound engineer come to Italy to commence mixing on a giallo film entitled The Equestrian Vortex —we are somewhere in the 1970s. This is not a horror film, Gilderoy is told—it’s a Santini film, Santini being the name of its director, a manipulative schemer and playboy of questionable talent. Whatever the case, Gilderoy just wants to do his job, which he clearly loves, and get his remuneration and travel reimbursements. But however touchy-feely these Italians may be, they seem alarmingly hesitant to cough up the promised cash. All Gilderoy can do is keep asking, keep working, and try to keep his head together.

Berberian Sound Studio is the second feature from English director Peter Strickland. It’s something of a horror film too, though the more time its protagonist spends on The Equestrian Vortex, the more Berberian Sound Studio begins to resemble a vortex itself. Gilderoy immerses himself in his work to an unhealthy degree—an alternate title could have been Audiodrome. Not a flicker of daylight penetrates the film, but the light of a film projector flickers away in scene after scene. This mixer’s sense of reality becomes mixed with that of the film he’s mixing—a film we never actually see. Mind you, while the film’s images are gorgeously lit and framed—images of foley artists massacring watermelons, of unhappy actresses overdubbing screams, of beautifully designed analogue gear in fetish close-up—we don’t really see much. What matters is what we hear, a meticulously textured sonic world slowly slipping away from the orderly and coherent until it shoots down an aural rabbit hole from which the film never returns.

Strickland has said that Berberian Sound Studio was inspired by music, specifically that of Nurse With Wound and Broadcast, who made the film’s excellent score. This comes as no surprise, not only because sound is central to the film—it’s literally the central word in the title—but because this film/object is less about telling a story than it is about the cultivation of a certain aesthetic/psychic space for the audience to inhabit. Watching Berberian Sound Studio so as to find out what happens next is probably not going to lead to a very satisfying experience—Inland Empire feels tidy and conclusive by comparison. Yet the film’s fascinating and often funny milieu is depicted with tremendous affection and detail. It is infused with a love of tape and moving parts, an interest in aspects of filmmaking rarely glamorized or dramatized, and an understanding of the peculiar, transitory relationships that form between the diverse artists and technicians that come together at various stages of production. I didn’t mind that Berberian Sound Studio didn’t really go anywhere, per se. I was happy to surrender to the creepy allure of this place for a time, and to heed the film’s most insistent visual refrain, an image of a flashing red sign that reads SILENZIO. Silence the part of your mind that wants any of this to make sense, and allow yourself to get lost in the hermetic realm of Berberian Sound Studio.    

       

Sympathy for the dumbbell

There are times when you’ve got to wonder if this young century that no longer feels young anymore, more specifically the eight years that have followed that famously fraudulent 2000 presidential election, hasn’t been some sort of prolonged bad dream from which America and all the rest of us are about to wake from with one wicked-ass hangover. George Walker Bush will soon be making his departure from the White House, the last stretch of what has proven to be one very long and wearying walk indeed. Some may argue that a preemptive strike on summarizing his presidency is unlawful, but such temperance has no firm place in the dictates of movies, and certainly not the movies of Oliver Stone, whose W. arrives in theatres just in time to greet the appointment of a new American president—though the film might be best viewed as a melancholy parting gift for the outgoing one.

Stone and Bush—could one ask for a more delightful contrast of names?—are exact contemporaries. They attended Yale at the same time, though apparently never met on the student party circuit. But Stone has never shied from identification with the great demons of recent history regardless of their political stripes, thus his portraits of both Nixon and Castro have been strangely tender in their way. As W. gets underway we find Bush (Josh Brolin, who when wearing a cowboy hat bears a striking resemblance to Billy Bob Thornton) circling the oval office, pivoting round an axis in precise opposition to Stone’s camera, as though the two are in a formal dance or are a pair of boxers sizing each other up. And all the while our supporting characters sit in heated discussion over how to characterize their nation’s nebulous post-9/11 enemy, settling, finally, on “axis of evil.” It’s a rousing opener, introducing our protagonist just when his confidence is at the highest it’ll ever be, setting us up for the stumbling ascension to power that led up to this moment and, we presume, the terrible downfall to follow. Curiously, over the next two hours, we’ll witness a great deal more of the former than the latter.

Written by Stanley Weiser, who co-scripted Stone’s Wall Street, W. needs to be viewed more as portraiture than polemic, even if it seems at times to want to be both. This character study is founded above all in Bush’s contentious, approval-seeking relationship with his father (James Cromwell), whose own presidency and its misadventures in foreign policy now look to us like an exercise in centrist moderation in comparison. Having succeeded as a frat boy and failed miserably as a student and labourer, we hear Bush Jr. berated by his dad for hi-jinx and aimlessness, ordered to stop behaving like a Kennedy and respect the family name. Bush Jr. will never fully heal from these wounds, exacerbated by his suspicion that brother Jeb’s the unspoken favourite. It is these wounds that’ll slowly give him the gumption to go into politics and later still become so embroiled in Iraq, convinced of his mission to finish the job dad abandoned back in 1991.

The familial grievances offer Weiser and Stone a classical, dramaturgically sound framework to build on, and they’ve tailored the chorus of advisory voices so as to heighten the sense of their protagonist as tragic fool: Richard Dryfuss as Cheney, condescending, shamelessly savouring the word “empire” like a fat lizard; Thandie Newton doing a fun, blood-curdling Condoleezza Rice; Scott Glen as a glinty-eyed if perhaps not sufficiently callous Rumsfeld; Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, the defeated, lonesome voice of reason and morality; Toby Jones as Karl Rove, seen here as nothing less than a Satanic puppet master. Each has their moment to carry the torch of flamboyant disgrace, though none rise above the level of strict support for Brolin, whose performance here is virtually flawless, all the more effective and troubling for being somehow perfectly sympathetic, as amiable a good ol’ boy as we always suspected Bush must have been before he was granted fearsome powers. When Rove questions his strut, Bush replies, “In Texas we call that walkin’,” and it’s clear that the man might have seemed refreshing when the peril of his incompetence was still abstract and distant. W. is more than allegory and Brolin finally too complex in his characterization to seem merely a product of a flawed system, though in the end his confusion alone seems the absolute measure of his character.

Given all this, all these factors begging to add up to something, how strange that W. seems to be lacking a last act. This absence of resolution is perhaps fitting given the absence of exit strategy that’s so hounded the occupation of Iraq. Yet however eloquent this structural parallel between reality and art, you couldn’t be blamed for desiring more when the credits suddenly appear, be it the long, draining road to the present or our sad hero’s final surrender to the knowledge of his true historical role as widely loathed blunderer on the world’s greatest and more consequential stage. Stone would seem up for at least one of these jobs, and spends much of the film building up to it with a welcome lack of directorly affectation, save a few oddball close-ups of belt buckles or ladies’ shoes smooshing corn cobs and a regrettable, entirely redundant dream sequence offering only one more confrontation with poppy. How Stone and Weiser came to decide on their abbreviated ending is ambiguous, but I suppose we at least can give them credit for leaving the final judgment on their subject up to us.