Recently, I watched 'The Man Who Wasn't There' on late-night TV, and the film was accompanied by signing. I found it almost unwatchable as a result. The whole point of this film is that the central character's language (both spoken and physical) is completely deadpan, and in conventional terms, inappropriate, in spite of the extreme situations he faces. But the signer was making big faces and extravagant gestures throughout the movie. Maybe this is an unusual film, maybe this was just a bad signer, but perhaps, one of the difficulties deaf people face is an inability to partake in the full subtlety of human interaction (the alternative view being that deaf people have wholly adequate means of communication and their main disability is the prejudice of the hearing). But these questions returned to me on watching 'Soundproof', a drama featuring both deaf and hearing characters, centred on the involvement of a volunteer translator in a police investigation. The film was quite effective in conveying the difficulties that deaf people can have. But some of the human interaction in the film seemed perfunctory. Perhaps this is because as a non-deaf individual, I don't know how to read the signs; perhaps it reflect the reality of life for the deaf; perhaps it's just a falling of this drama, but I found is hard to really believe in the characters' inter-relationships, or relate to them myself. I guess it didn't help that the two lead characters (one deaf, one not) were both treated with unearned sympathy throughout, while the bigoted character seemed fated from the start not to be redeemed. Perhaps the film's real failing was its attempt, through the character of the interpreter, to bridge two worlds at once. A story set wholly in the world of the deaf would not only have been braver, but also more enlightening.
