![]() A buttoned-down mother’s boy who works in his garden shed, Gilderoy is unprepared for the graphic scenes of torture he’s forced to witness. Toby Jones hits a career best as Gilderoy, an English sound recordist who, in the early 1970s, arrives at an Italian recording studio to work on the Foley track of a groundbreaking new horror picture. It’s always better to aim high and fall short. So if the film doesn’t quite scale the lofty peaks that writer-director Peter Strickland has set his sights on, it’s easy to forgive. There are scenes, sensations and (especially) sounds here that feel altogether new, strange and exciting. Based on his previous film and now this, I have this filmmaker on my short list of talent that I expect he has it in him to be a leading voice a decade from now.How do you measure success in cinema? ‘Berberian Sound Studio’ is a stylistically ambitious, morally radical, thematically complex work. ![]() So I think you must see this at one point. ![]() Wickedly clever! Because it puts us in the protagonist's shoes, by introducing a disruptive level of imagination. By making it so immediate, it's a powerful exhibit, observable in your own self, of the mind acquiring illusory images - the images become what the off- screen voice announces. But more marvelous is exemplifying the mechanism of that illusion that creates the imagined horror story in our mind - the second time the sound becomes the mental image just described to us. It's fun to see on a fundamental level as exposing the kind of unceremonious but inventive technical work that takes place behind cinematic curtains of illusion. The first time we see the effect being recorded, and then an off-screen voice announces what it is supposed to be the sound of, and it's done a second time. All sorts of sound effects are constructed over the course of the film before our eyes, from ordinary means: melons are slashed, pumpkins are splattered, broth is boiling. But there's something else I liked, simple and inventive. Oh, we get obvious hallucination in the latter stages that I could do without, linked to movie screens as borders of reality - it clarifies too much. The actual horror movie is never seen (except for the opening credits which serve as the credits to our film), always inferred from what we see of the sound-carpet being fitted, the screams and slashing sounds, and this is a crucial point: the horror movie never quite materializes, so there's widespread negativity in reviews. The film is entirely contained on a soundstage and around the studio where the soundtrack is being prepared. Funny: shy is here equated with unattractive appearance in the main actor. He is an introvert, so we can have this conflation of inner and outer sensitivity to phenomena. The story is that a shy sound-man goes to work on an Italian exploitation movie, this is to establish him as a creative person who will have to imagine things, and to establish the things he's going to imagine as of some darkness. DePalma could do this type of film, fooling with layered placement and identity of the eye-it'd be as cool as this and obvious in its main thrust about madness, but probably not as ambient. The challenge is how to model madness, by what degrees to confuse and clarify. I'm a big fan of films where impressionable protagonists enter a world of images and fictions. ![]()
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