Just a note: this is not a review of Sound of Metal, which is a drama...or (for that matter) The Sound of Music...which is The Sound of Music. This from a movie with a similar sounding name that's a "caper movie" from Sweden.
Written at the time of the film's release in America.
Ruhe, Bitte! or "
Ett,Två, Tre, Fyra "
What better way to celebrate Robert Moog's 78th birthday than a look at this fascinating 2010 film, which is just making its way to local theaters in my area?
Sound of Noise is right in my wheel-house (or more appropriately) bass-trap, and is fun for anyone who might be "into" music, sampling, and sound design. It, for certain, has my vote for best "sound design" of the films I've seen so far this year (despite the filmmakers using a lot of "sounds" that seem very familiar to me).
A product of Sweden (and released there in 2010), it involves artist-types (in this case, musicians, and more extremely, drummers) who've had it with a world being satiated and lulled with a steady stream of elevator music, whether in confined spaces, or piped onto the streets themselves. "Listen to this city, contaminated with shitty music!" fumes Sanna Persson (played by...Sanna Persson), after she and her partner Magnus (played by Magnus Börjeson) perform a piece that gets them in dutch with the police. That performance is to drive the van along the freeway while Magnus drums in the back and Sanna gears up and down through the van's transmission, driving over highway turtles, in effect playing a musique concrete piece...or should that be musique asphalt? A subsequent police pursuit causes a crescendo into a local embassy, attracting the attention of the city's anti-terrorist unit, and investigator Amadeus Warnebring (Bengt Nilsson, in a terrific performance).
Warnebring has grown up in a musical family, steeped in the world, snooty with it, but for him, there was no interest. His brother became a world-class (and arrogant) conductor, and Amadeus is the silent black sheep of the family and developed a severe dislike of music in general, which has strained their relationships.
But just because he isn't "musical," of note, doesn't mean he doesn't have gifts. Despite the hustle-bustle of the embassy crash site, while the rest of the scene is speculating whether there's a bomb in the van, he recognizes a sound, and stealthily approaches the ticking van. It's not an IED. It's a metronome, still swaying with the beat, a reminder of his youth staring at the keys of a piano.
That proclivity for silence will come in good stead on this investigation. For the musicians have composed a piece "for city and six drummers" in four parts that will wreak havoc on the city and disrupt life as we know it. Gathering up four rebel drummers (are there any other kind?) Sanna and Magnus plan four performances that "might be dangerous, certainly illegal" for the group to perform, each using "found" sound and the materials at hand to pull off.
This is where the film really gets good...and clever. Each performance (telling would be spoiling) is intricately planned and performed, each becoming simpler and more disruptive in its effects until it becomes personal for the detective, who is always just a step behind...until the third movement. To explain further would be spoiling the surprises, and the enjoyment of the thing, but the film-makers are extraordinarily clever in the creation of the piece as a whole, working in a variety of media (including animation) to pull it off.
This is the sort of film-making that gives one hope, and although some CGI is employed (there had to be), it's of the seamless variety that doesn't over-stage, but merely supports the idea. Sound of Noise is odd, wacky, and quite extraordinary, and rises above the static of most film-making being done today.
The 2001 short film on which the feature is based...
Investigative reporter Mikael Blomqvist (a nom de plume purloined from the fictional detective Kalle Blomqvist) has just been found guilty of libel for an article he wrote about a powerful Swiss industrialist. In six months he's set for the barry hotel, but in the meantime, he has down-time. He gets an invitation for a job—the coldest of cases, literally and metaphorically—on the remote wintry island that serves as a compound for the Vanger family. The Vangers are the Swiss cousins of all the encrusted old-money families of British and American detective fiction. Be they Baskervilles or Armstrongs or Sternwoods, the "storied" elite families stood in for the Rothschilds and Lindberghs and Morgans and Rockefellers in a literary class warfare that assured the punters that bad things happened to the rich, as well. In fact, it was more than likely to happen to them as money is the root of all things evil. Perhaps.
Money was on the family's mind that Children's Day weekend on the Island, as a family board meeting was taking place, when one of the daughters disappeared, and her father drowned in a boating accident. One of the patriarchs wants to know, finally, forty years after the fact, what happened to the girl, who killed her, and charges Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) with the task.
For the disgraced newsie, it's a case of interviews and solitary visits to the caked-in-dust morgues of newspaper offices and libraries. But, though isolated on the Island, he's being watched, not only by the family, but by a security investigator who's hacked his computer.
She's Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,*a 22 year old full-time goth-punk chain-smoking, bisexual, PTSD'd borderline schizophrenic, sociopathic, fire-fixated security-investigator-computer-hacker...and part-time judge, jury and executioner. And where Mikael is dusting off old store-rooms, she's mining hard-drives through the back-door for any information that might be useful, like, say, on the creep who's been appointed her guardian. Life has rumpled Mikael, but it's deeply scarred Lisbeth, and the two tarnished angels are linked by more than cyberspace in a mutual interest making peoples' forgotten pasts their field of play.
They were made for each other, and, as both are incapable of seeing a mystery without inserting themselves, fated to team up to solve the question, if it is to be solved.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is one of those whodunnit's much in love with every squeaking trope, and dangling aringarosa of the detective literary genre, and the puzzle is of the classic "Closed Room" variety—a traffic accident cut off the one exit to the bridge when the skull-duggery happened, so the scope of the search is limited to who might have been on that island to perpetrate it. The clues are varied in sources and nature, an old diary the girl kept with no entries that might lend suspicion, the few photographs taken that week-end...and Blomkvist's own memories—the girl was his nanny on Island holidays—provide nagging evidence, as does a single portrait that haunts him, like the Mona Lisa.
There are so many referrals to past films noir and sleuth-cinema that one could get lost in many a blind-alley (not that there are many on a rural Swedish island), but there are more than enough cousins and butlers and drawing rooms to go around—as with the best mysteries, no one is a suspect, but everyone is.
It is violent—there are two upsetting rape scenes that are essential to the plot, ultimately—but there is a cross-running sub-theme of sexual tyranny equating male sexism and domination as a form of fascism (it's an in-bred cousin to the feminism issues that made The Silence of the Lambs more important than a "boogey-man" story) that makes the film interesting philosophically in the genre. Director Niels Arden Oplev stages those scenes in a brutal manner that divorces them from any sexual act and makes them sadistic acts of violence, but one should be warned that there is rough stuff, far beyond cloak-room murders and high tea. The film is unrated, but consider it a hard "R."
It's a cracking pastiche, with the best thing about it being the (English version's) titular character. A product of the very brutality embodied by the mystery itself, the stakes are personal for Salander (and Blomkvist, certainly), but, like the Hannibal Lecter character in Silence of the Lambs, she is such a wild-cannon on deck during the proceedings that her motivations keep your thinking cap distracted from the mystery at hand. As played by Rapace, she is a kabuki-like presence than can turn ninja on a dime, a literal smoking gun, who can make things better or worse, depending on her buried mood, making the film categorical as "Suspense" as well as "Mystery." The other films in the trilogy will be released later in the year. Then, an American remake is planned...at this writing starring Brad Pitt and Carey Mulligan. (Yeah, well, not so much...see below)
* That's what it is known as in English-speaking publishing circles where mysteries series need a unifying "hook" like John D. McDonald's colorful titles for the Travis McGee novels, or "Cat" series of Lilian Jackson Braun. In its native Sweden, the title—"Män som hatar kvinnor "— translates to the more straight-forward and to-the-point, "Men Who Hate Women." The popular series of novels, dubbed the "Millennium Trilogy" (for the publication Blomqvist works for) stopped at three due to the untimely death of its reporter/author Stieg Larsson of a heart attack at age 50, before the first could be published. Michael Nykvist, who starred in the Swedish films, died June 27, 2017
"The Girl With the Dragon, Take Two" or "Once More...with Feeling"
"We come from the land of the ice and snow
from the midnight sun where the hot springs FLOW How soft your fields so green, can whisper tales of gore,
Of how we calmed the tides of war. We are your overlords.
On we sweep with threshing oar, Our only goal will be the western shore."
"Immigrant Song" Led Zeppelin
The American production ofThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo advertised itself (amusingly) with the tag-line "The Feel Bad Movie for Christmas." Compared to the Swedish-TV version (with Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace), it's actually, if one can believe it given the subject matter, a "kinder, gentler" version.
So, what's different? For those familiar with the first version, many of the locations reveal themselves to be the same. Resolutions are slightly different. The casting certainly is (and more on that later). Editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall keep things moving very fast, sometimes abruptly, and scripter Steven Zaillian delivers punchy dialogue dripping with icyclic irony, while keeping the circumstances equally savage and shocking (what else can you expect from from a murder mystery involving in-bred families crusty with krona, corruption, Nazi affiliations, serial killers, sexual violence and "men who hate women"—the original title of the book when published in Sweden?).
It's how director David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, The Social Network) approaches the tone that's slightly different, and though still mordantly frigid, this version is a bit more clever in presentation, adding a darkly humorous slant. Sure, the violence is still sickening, but blunted, even handled at times more discretely, making the impact contrarily even more squeamy, while, at the same time, counter-pointing with sly musical choices.*
Too true, not only in terms of Society, but also from the actress who previously took the role (Noomi Rapace, currently starring inSherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows). She's still the same Salander, the goth-punk, vegan, pierced, bi-sexual hacker-savant who becomes the focus of the series, zipping around the bleak Swedish countryside on her black-on-black motorcycle, but this movies version, in the form of Rooney Mara, is slight (she had to be starring opposite the 5'10" Craig), tiny and even more startling in appearance than Rapace.
There's still the same shock of hair, but with her elfin face, shaved eyebrows and eyes sunk deep into her face, she has the appearance of the walking dead, her head looking often like a skull, and speaking in a dull, listless monotone. Rapace looked like she could kick serious ass (and did in the Swedish productions), but Mara is deceptively tiny, even looking sickly frail, so when she goes on the attack, it's doubly alarming.
We learn more about the little spit-fire in the second and third books of the series (hopefully they'll have their own versions with this cast—as with the Swedish films—because this cast is too good to waste, but the film's poor box-office showing—"The Feel-Bad Movie of Christmas," remember?—may make that unlikely), but Mara's dead-inside interpretation, that only slightly blossoms through the film, is an interesting take, doubly tragic, keenly felt and puts both her character and Blomqvist's into an interesting perspective.
I actually like this version better than the first.
The main title with the Trent Reznor/Karen O version of the Led Zep song.
* The best being what was used in the initial trailers—Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," subtly adapted by producer-composer Trent Reznor (the perfect guy to score this film) for female vocal, while keeping the brutal orchestrations of the original intact. The Main Title sequence accompanying it, is visually arresting, suggestive and creepy, almost a mission statement in tone—black and white, reflecting the film's dark muted color scheme—while suggesting minds, trapped, tortured and squirming like toads.
This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the snarky, clueless kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.
This Saturday's ASUW film program is something very special: Jan Troell's "The Emigrants" and "The New Land"—an unglossed, beautifully done look at a Swedish community's emigration to America.
The Emigrants/The New Landaka "Utvandrarna"/"Nybyggarna"(Jan Troell, 1971) When it was released in Sweden, Jan Troell's film was all of a piece—a several hours epic called "The Emigrants." Americans are notorious for not being able to sit that long to watch one movie, and so for American distribution, it was cut into two parts (as wasRichard Lester'sThe Three Musketeers). Fortunately, the film had a natural break in the middle, as Troell's film was based on two books in a trilogy*by Vilhelm Moberg, so there was little, if any, damage to the story as far as continuity.
And it is quite a story: the tales of how the emigrants left everything they had, searching for a nirvana they heard about called America, and then, when arriving, found the stories were stories and that their struggles had to continue...as there was no way back. (These stories) have always had a special place in the history of film, especially American film. Audiences have long taken an interest in the struggles of their forebears—one of the reasons why ABC's "Roots" has gone through the ratings roof this week. One can possibly attribute this to a kind of lazy pride, clutching the courage and struggles of our ancestors to ourselves. And if so, so what? We're all entitled to a little pride in their accomplishments. It might provide the springboard for some equally courageous acts in our lives. And this pride in the past struggles reaches across racial/religious lines: we can feel proud at the struggle of other peoples' against their misfortunes. Hence, the great popularity displayed by "Roots" this week.
What about the movie, huh?)**
Oh...yeah. Jan Troell's treatment of the sometimes gentle, sometimes violent story of The Emigrants is to treat it gently, "matter-of-factly." He has compassion for his community, but that compassion will not allow him to prevent the cruelties of the journey, the country and the people of America. And there is a poetry in this style. Stanley Kubrick found it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Barry Lyndon, and Troell has it throughout The Emigrants and The New Land, with only one exception in the latter.
The film starts in Sweden as Karl-Oskar Nillsson is pressured by family needs to take a wife and we are presented with Kristina. It is Liv Ullmannand her life previous to the marriage to Karl-Oskar is presented to us in a brief, languorous series of shots that entail an entire life of child-like freedom—sheltered, playful and entirely composed of little incidents, little insignificant moments, that thoroughly define her character and will stay with us throughout both movies as we see her struggle and grow old too early with her husband. Those moments remained in my mind through the films, and I saw them a year apart.
Those few moments of insignificance that tell the story are what define Troell's style of story-telling. It means that the actors are put under a great strain to present authentic portraits of people, and the cast led by Max von Sydow and Ullmann come through with a total feeling of lived-in performances. You believe every one of the actors are who they are, that the relationships are real, (and) they are a community. There's not a false moment there in a film that is totally composed of moments suspended in time.
I'm not going to go through a list of favorite moments—there are too many that they are a jumble in my mind. but there is one: Karl-Oskar hacking his way through foliage—surveying—walking through this alien country. He pauses, takes his axe and hacks into a tree. He writes his name on the un-barked portion and then, in a way summarizing the whole of what has gone before, lies under the tree and tips his hat over his eyes, his back supported by the tree—his land. It's a scene of total satisfaction. And you felt that satisfaction with him because you've been through it with him. That scene ends The Emigrants and begins The New Land and I envy anyone who enters 130 Kane Saturday night and can experience—in one sitting—this epic that is only small in scale.
Broadcast on KCMU-FM on January 28-29th, 1977
Thirty-two years on, if you mention The Emigrants to me, that scene is the one that pops up—of Max Von Sydow silently lying under the tree, his hat over his eyes, in a moment of peace and solitude that it has taken an entire movie to achieve. It is remembered fondly. The Emigrants was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture and it's hard to imagine it making its way through the rabble in this day and age to become one of The Five. It's narrative structure (what I was painfully trying to explain here) is supported by its images, rather than a straight-ahead narration. The camera sits back and observes, making no editorial comment, picking up telling details by accident as if it was a documentary—a documentary where the light is just right and everything is extremely picturesque.
But it is no more oblique because of it, and it is presented without pretension or artifice, except to make it all look as good as can be. There was a market for this kind of film in the 60's and early 70's, although one doubts that one could convince today's casual movie-goer of making plans to see these two films about the emigrant experience in early America—that field's been plowed in the minds of today's audience, and it might not be an evening's entertainment to see people working hard to build a life out of the dirt.
But it's worth it, if only to see von Sydow and Ullmann—two of Ingmar Bergman's stökk company—in a couple of their best roles. And there are benefits in seeing a good story well-told.
A couple of observations: "Roots" was on everybody's collective mind when this review was written, so it was probably natural to stem off of it, but there's a bit too much made of it, as the review is about The Emigrants, after all; The comparison to 2001 is apt as far as story-telling style, but not Barry Lyndon—Lyndon has an omniscient Narrator (albeit a rather judgmental and unkind one given its knowledge of history), while The Emigrants does not. The review really doesn't do much service to the films, which are marvelous. After these films, Troell went "Hollywood" for an ill-advised remake of John Ford's The Hurricane (starring Mia Farrow!), then returned to Sweden, where he continues to work today, making features, documentaries and shorts. His most recent work was 2012. The Last Sentence.
* Actually a tetralogy: "The Emigrants" (1951), "Unto a Good Land" (1954), "The Settlers" (1961), and "The Last Letter Home" (1961). (or is it a "quadrilogy?")
Warnebring has grown up in a musical family, steeped in the world, snooty with it, but for him, there was no interest. His brother became a world-class (and arrogant) conductor, and Amadeus is the silent black sheep of the family and developed a severe dislike of music in general, which has strained their relationships. 
But just because he isn't "musical," of note, doesn't mean he doesn't have gifts. Despite the hustle-bustle of the embassy crash site, while the rest of the scene is speculating whether there's a bomb in the van, he recognizes a sound, and stealthily approaches the ticking van. It's not an IED. It's a metronome, still swaying with the beat, a reminder of his youth staring at the keys of a piano.
That proclivity for silence will come in good stead on this investigation. For the musicians have composed a piece "for city and six drummers" in four parts that will wreak havoc on the city and disrupt life as we know it. Gathering up four rebel drummers (are there any other kind?) Sanna and Magnus plan four performances that "might be dangerous, certainly illegal" for the group to perform, each using "found" sound and the materials at hand to pull off.
This is where the film really gets good...and clever. Each performance (telling would be spoiling) is intricately planned and performed, each becoming simpler and more disruptive in its effects until it becomes personal for the detective, who is always just a step behind...until the third movement. To explain further would be spoiling the surprises, and the enjoyment of the thing, but the film-makers are extraordinarily clever in the creation of the piece as a whole, working in a variety of media (including animation) to pull it off.
This is the sort of film-making that gives one hope, and although some CGI is employed (there had to be), it's of the seamless variety that doesn't over-stage, but merely supports the idea. Sound of Noise is odd, wacky, and quite extraordinary, and rises above the static of most film-making being done today.
