|
by Ronnie Scheib (May 4, 2005)
Both
stylistic tour-de-force and neverending assault on one's
patience, Amir Naderi's latest black-and-white excursion
into obsession may be the most extended mise en scene
of pure frustration in cinema history, as a deaf-mute
boy searches for answers on an old audio tape of his
dead mother's voice. Formally abstract yet intensely
emotional, pic returns to the concentrated minimalism
of Naderi's seminal Iranian works, but with a frenzy
and fragmentation all the stronger for being crammed
into two impossibly claustrophobic spaces. A fest must-see,
this demanding masterwork could command fringe arthouse
play.
A
letter to his mother from a fan of her radiotalk show
leads 11-year-old Jesse (Charlie Wilson) to a storage
facility in Queens. There, in a tiny locked room, an
assortment of tape recorders set to different bands,
and row upon row of meticulously labeled boxes are stacked
to the ceiling. All bear the names of women talkshow
hosts and the episodes' recording dates.
Working
his way through the piles with no plan or logic, Jesse
grows increasingly impatient, flinging aside boxes and
climbing over mountains of spilled cassettes, his anger
escalating.
As
the pace of the search accelerates, so does Naderi's
editing, the actions chopped up into flurries of motion
exploding around the tiny room as the camera rides Jesse's
whirlwind. Meanwhile, the soundtrack is disorientingly
broken up, the cacophony of crashing boxes and crunching
cassettes irregularly erupting into weird, subterranean,
echo-y silence.
A
streak of perversity runs through "Sound Barrier."
When Jesse finally emerges from the warehouse with the
tape and compatible tape recorder, he situates himself
at the noisiest spot in the city, on a nearby drawbridge
heavily traveled by trucks, and attempts to flag down
passersby on foot or bicycle, offering them $20 to recite
the contents of the tape so that he might lip-read their
words.
|
The
decibel level is excruciating, as trucks thunder by
with horns blaring, the barrage of splintered sound
and image no less claustrophobic for being outdoors.
It's a struggle to hear through the din the traumatic
circumstances of what turns out to be Jesse's psychosomatic
hearing loss -- with bits of narrative doled out through
sound distortions, rewinds, close-ups of moving lips,
and stretches of throbbing silence as the wheels of
the cassette slowly turn.
The
layered sound-and-image collage never palls, as exhilarating
as it is exhausting. Then, switching gears, Naderi throws
in a maddening audio deus ex machina that denies
catharsis.
The
viewer's frustration is mirrored in Jesse's uncontrollable
rage as he destroys all existing cassettes of his mother's
show, the narrow ribbons of tape blanketing the bridge
and streaming into the water. In one of film's most
potent set-pieces of futility, Jesse belatedly tries
to retrieve the tapes amid the oncoming traffic.
Like
Naderi's Teheran-set "The Runner," or his
New York-set "Marathon," "Barrier"
is about fierce concentration on deciphering seemingly
unintelligible codes deeply embedded in specific topography.
Stubbornness and anger prove potent enablers, and "Barrier"
ends in unlikely, strangely solitary, triumph.
Mike
Simmonds' stunning black-and-white lensing defies spatial
limits and pedestrian self-preservation. Imagery is
rhythmically kaleidoscoped through 1,753 separate cuts,
though one might mourn the budgetary strictures that
forced Naderi to switch from Super-16mm to HD.
"It
is one of the most stunning films I have seen this year."
-- Peter Scarlet, Director of the Tribeca Film
Festival on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC,
April 19, 2005
The
Top 40 Picks From the Tribeca Film Festival:
Sound Barrier: Iranian master Amir Naderi's latest
dispatch from the streets
of his adopted New York represents a return to the themes
of his seminal The Runner. Fending for himself in an
indifferent city, a deaf boy searches for the remaining
traces of his dead mother, a radio talk show host who
left behind a collection of audio cassettes in a Greenpoint
warehouse. As is customary in Naderi's oeuvre, sound
design is crucial, and the movie gradually builds to
an aural tour de force set on a congested bridge. Exhilarating
and exhausting — with a finale that is quite literally
an epiphany. —
Village
Voice
|
