Berberian Sound Studio is a smug film like few others. It
loves itself. It loves how clever, how different, how unconventional it is.
There hasn’t been a film more vain since last year’s Kill List, the Frightfest film
also promoted by Total Film.
Peter Strickland’s follow up to the beautiful Katalin Varga tells of, no, alludes to the tale of British sound
engineer, Gilderoy, going to work on a giallo horror film (sorry, a Santini
film). But what toll will the violence and depravity that Gilderoy is bringing
to life take on his mental and, perhaps, physical wellbeing.
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| Vegetables were harmed in the making of this picture |
The
problem is that, without giving anything away (not that there’s much to), the
film deliberately delivers on none of the intrigue the initial thirty minutes
sets up. A conceptual film is fine but Berberian Sound Studio is neither
here nor there and ultimately falls flat on all fronts: too much story to work
on a conceptual level, not enough validation to work on a narrative level. Its
ambition of being somewhat about what cinema intrinsically is recalled Antonio
Campos’ sublime, under seen debut Afterschool, a film all about observation and
perspectives and one that works on all levels Berberian Sound Studio doesn’t.
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| Toby Jone tunes up as Gilderoy |
Roger Ebert once said that Mulholland Drive was an
experiment that didn’t break the test-tube. For the first half hour Strickland’s
film feels like such an experiment, one rife with reference, humour, unease and
some wonderful sections of gruesome sound recordings, but after the initial
promise any hope deflates rapidly. The film is conceited, portentous and in the
end, frustratingly insulting to its audiences' intellect. The film is in a way
an ode to cinema but if only it was really cinema itself.
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