The third and final film we saw at the International Film Festival, Sound of Noise is, like the film the previous night, difficult to describe without sounding insane. It's a Swedish crime drama, about a gang of anarchists who terrorise a city by... playing unusual pieces of music on a hospital patient, in a bank, using heavy plant machinery and on electricity powerlines. Oh and everything the group play on is rendered mute... for music-hating detective Amadeus Warnebring (Bengt Nilsson). See how hard this is to describe??
brilliant, but...
It would be a little unfair to compare Sound of Noise with Detroit Metal City as they are very different prospects, united only by an unusual approach to music and comedy and my having seen them on consecutive nights. However, Sound of Noise suffers in comparison as although it has a lot of inventive content, it takes itself far more seriously than DMC. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy Sound of Noise - I think part of my resistance is that it was a busy work week, with 3 subtitled movies one night after another... I could have done with something a bit lighter to finish the trilogy. The cast underplay the roles, keeping everything low key, not even questioning the preposterousness of the film's premise, which really helps the audience buy into the odd reality in which Warnebring and co exist. The musical compositions themselves are the movie's highlights, ingenious sequences of novel music-making that actually work as melodies. There are not enough moments of musical exhilaration though, and the characters can be frustratingly laid back.
A weird Swedish hybrid of comedy, crime drama, musical and romance that would work better with a greater degree of knowingness.
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