The Artist

The Artist
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655442/

It turns out I'm a miserable old curmudgeon who just likes to pick holes in things. The critics all seem utterly in love with this film but I am slightly less enthusiastic. I liked it, not denying that: it has a whimsical charm which manages to stop on the right side of cloying, but musically it was unexpectedly disappointing, given that it is busy sweeping the boards for best original music with a Golden Globe already in the bag and a BAFTA looking likely. It got off to a very good start (and this was typical of a number of sonic double bluffs and sleights of hand which cropped up at regular intervals) as we began with a dramatic episode of what was evidently our hero being tortured by evil Russians, only to take a step back and discover we were watching a film within a film, and that the orchestral music we were hearing was the live orchestra we now saw playing along to the film in a 1927 movie theatre. Only it wasn't: it became rapidly obvious that the music we were hearing could not be coming from the visible orchestra as the conductor's beat was not quite synchronised and the movements of the players did not match the sound; added to which there was a complete absence of any kind of sound coming from the variously gasping and laughing members of the audience. Welcome to the world of The Artist, a mostly but not quite silent movie that paradoxically tells the story of how the talkies killed off the silents. Other diegetic musical games are played elsewhere, most notably a dream sequence in which the hero, George, discovers that everything and everyone can make sounds except him, so we hear the sound of a glass as it is placed on a table, we hear footsteps and laughter, but George himself talks, then shouts, utterly silently. Finally, he sees a feather falling gently through the air, which touches the ground with a shockingly loud crash as George screams soundlessly and wakes. The sequence at the end also allows sound back in, but otherwise this is, if not a genuinely silent film, nonetheless a diegetically silent film in that other than these episodes, the only sound is the music that accompanies the image. And the music is not great, alas (sorry not to be as taken with it as wveeryone else seems to be). Ironically, the most successful sequences are often those written to accompany the films within the film, where Ludovic Bource scores more obviously to the action, and uses a more varied palette of musical gestures. The problem with the bulk of the score is that it is simply too repetitive, a series of often quite long cues that use a single riff ad infinitum for an entire scene. It reminded me a little of the music used in The Sting (1973), set at a similar time to The Artist, which used a series of arrangements of piano rags by Scott Joplin to evoke the period and provide a fairly light, emotionally understated and rather charming underscore that I am very fond of. A similar strategy is less successful here, because the understated musical sound of the The Sting was balanced by all the other sound in the film, and here there really is no other sound for the majority of the film. Some of it is scored more dramatically, especially in the latter part of the film but overall it just isn't particularly interesting music: Bource largely pastiches 1920s dance music and to some extent pastiches what I think we assume silent movie music would have sounded like, and its all terribly charming, but I'm not convinced its particularly interesting. Some of the most striking moments are actually when the music stops and we have a period of absolute silence as the characters "talk", not only soundlessly but without even the ambient, background sound of the environment in which we see them - it's shockingly disconcerting when suddenly the only thing you can hear is the shuffling and breathing of the other members of the audience around you and you suddenly realise exactly what Adorno was talking about when he described a film experienced in silence as 'uncanny'. The dream sequence is one of those moments - no music at all, just the sound design (quickest gig for any sound designer in recent history, I imagine) and is really effective as a result. But alas, although I enjoyed both the film and the experiment, the fact that I can't help listening to the music meant that I found some of it desperately annoying in its relentless repetitions, curmudgeon that I am.