The Sound of People (2007) Reviews

• Poetic meditation on mortality

  Balthazar-52008-04-20

  Sometimes the market doesn't work. In theory, if a film-maker shows himself to be incredibly talented, some producer snaps him up and provides the resources to make a film that will in turn make a financial impact on the market etc., etc. Here we have the most talented Irish director since Neil Jordan - without ANY question. He has made two short films that have made everything around them look flat. Both have won prizes, but still he hasn't had the opportunity to make something worthy of his immense talents. 'The Sound of People' is an extraordinary work. It takes a tiny moment in he life of a young man and expands it - using a kind of visual stream of consciousness that has happened elsewhere in the cinema (say the last minute or so of 'American Beauty', or the sensational last five minutes of 'The New World'). Yes, it is Malick-like in style and structure but not in content. It is philosophical - a meditation on life and death and what separates the two - and yet it is also quite down to earth, as the ideas that it examines have probably occurred to many or most of the people who watch it. In a strange way, it is also literary. A visualisation of something that Joyce or Beckett might have written. But then again it is painterly - using the ever-changing patterns on the surface of a swimming pool to suggest what cannot be seen. But most of all it is cinematic - doing spectacularly and brilliantly what only the cinema can do - to see the world in a new light. One imagines Fitzmaurice repeating the famous words of D W Griffith - 'What, above all else, I am trying to do is to make you see.' And he does. Message loud and clear to the film industry - DON'T LET THIS TALENT GO TO WASTE!!!

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