Sound of Noise

Viewed at the Festival du Film, Cannes 2010

Now that you've read the plot summary... Okay, a group of drummers terrorise a city with their daring musical 'raids' while a tone deaf, music hating, detective tries to track them down... The Sound of Noise is the kind of dark comedic madness only the Scandinavians do so well: percussionists as musical terrorists laying down the beat for an entire city.

This is a conceit built around the musicians themselves, taking several of their set-piece numbers and weaving them into a narrative structure. In this sense, seen as a film with the classic three act structure, story and character development etc., Sound of Noise is less successful. But as a showcase for amazing musical ability and sheer imagination, this film cannot be beaten.

My husband and I saw this tonight at the Seattle International Film Festival and we can't wait to be able to share it with our friends. The story is simple but endlessly creative: a group of musicians attempt to bring music to a city while a police officer attempts to get some much-needed peace and quiet.

We enjoyed the touches of whimsy and magic and were increasingly impressed by each successive musical experiment. The dialogue, the visual cues, and, yes, the music itself kept us riveted to the screen. The movie was received well by the audience, who rewarded it with hearty laughter in many places and a long round of applause at the end.

This film can be appreciated by everyone, from the highly musical (myself) to the tone-deaf (my husband)!

Sound of Noise (2010)

An absurdist, zany, intense, unpredictable film. Rather amazing, really, if you can let go of an ordinary sense of plot and progression.

At the center is a group of drummers who agree to perform a series of pieces by a cutting edge composer all around the city. But their instruments become found objects, heavy machinery, office items, hospital equipment (and hospital patient), so that their performances are intrusive, dangerous, illegal, and wonderfully outrageous.

And funny. Sometimes you laugh aloud, sometimes you just are amused and amazed.

In opposition to this group is a detective who grew up in a family of musicians but who is tone deaf. And he as a special ability to track the musical perps in their crimes--which you'll see.

Kudos should also go to the filmmakers themselves, who make this craziness very fluid and beautiful. Contemporary Stockholm is shown as complex and beautiful and modern and not a Swedish Ikea stereotype.

Finally there is a kind of interpersonal plot that is sort of fun and thin and helps hold the various performance pieces together. Maybe anything more intense on this score would have watered down the absurdist heights of the best of it, but this subplot does have a feel-good pops quality that the rest of the movie avoids. And it's the rest of the movie--mainly the "music" as it happens before your eyes--that is what counts. Great stuff!

When The Sound of Noise ended, I wasn't entirely sure what to think about it. Here is a film so bizarre, with a plot so daffy that it becomes one of those films that you either embrace or reject. It took me quite some time to figure out where I stand with it, and as of now I'm on the embracing side with a few minor reservations.

This is a caper film, but not of the Michael Mann variety. This is something that might make have added Bansky to its thank you's during the closing credits. It involves an unfortunate soul named Amadeus Warnebring, who was born into a family of musical legends. Unfortunately, he was born tone deaf. With that, he grew up and became a detective.

Amadeus seems to be very good at this job, but seems trumped in his current task of tracking down the identities of a terrorist group who have been committing random acts of public disruption. They don't blow things up or hurt anyone, no, they play music at inappropriate places. As the movie opens, the ringleader is being chased through town in a van by the cops while her boyfriend sits in the back and plays the drums in time to a metronome. They act as a sort of Bonnie and Clyde of auditory disruption. What they are doing doesn't seem to make any sense, but what they accomplish is some kind of weird genius.

The crooks get away, and Amadeus is on their trail. We meet the couple, Sanna and Magnus as they work to pull together a masterpiece of musical distraction. They hire four expert drummers, all with differing styles, and determine what objects make the perfect percussive sounds. Their plan is to break into four major institutions, a hospital, a bank, an opera house and high-tension towers and play their music on objects that might be considered non-musical. Each crime will represent a different movement in their composition.

The music isn't especially good, but the audacity with which they commit their dastardly deeds is kind of fun. Attempting to find a purpose behind this might be as futile as trying to understand why clouds look like everyday objects. In the pattern of poetry, it might be said "because it's there." The film has an inevitable sense of humor from which it never recedes. A film this bizarre wouldn't work if it allowed any measure of seriousness to seep in. The scene set in a hospital is the most curious, a the terrorist use the belly of a fat man as one of their instruments and the sound of the oxygen tanks for the tones. The scene at the high-tension towers is the most memorable, with the city's power grid blinking on and off like a bizarre Christmas light display. It is a sight to behold.

If there is a weakness, I'm afraid that it is that this film runs on a bit longer than it should. It is based on a 2001 short film called "Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers" which ran this premise just about as far as it possibly could. This film, at an hour and forty-two minutes, runs its course probably about a half hour longer than it should. Yet, while I complain about the length, I won't complain about the content. I will only say that while it is a good film, not a great one, it succeeded in giving me an experience that I can't say I've ever had before. That's a good thing.

Amadeus Warnebring is a police detective. He is tone-deaf from birth despite coming from a family of extraordinary musicians. As such, he has a complicated and distasteful relationship with music. Sanna and Magnus lead a group of underground musicians looking for new sounds. They break into a hospital and play a famous patient. Amadeus is brought in to investigate the "terrorists".

This is much more fun on the page. The musical capers have a certain energy but they do get tired by the end. The deadpan humor is not the funniest but I see what they're trying for. It has great originality and the percussive fun of the Blue Man Group. Full marks for the idea if not for the execution.