Peter Strickland (2012)

Peter Strickland’s second feature, which he also wrote, is highly accomplished.   Berberian Sound Studio is the tale of Gilderoy, a sound effects man – specifically a ‘foley artist’ – working on an Italian ‘giallo‘ horror movie of the 1970s, and a long way from home.   Strickland has created an aptly grisly soundtrack and he uses things like fruit and vegetables to combined visual and aural effect.  The effect is also both startling and comic.   The opening credits sequence, a pastiche of giallo style and colour, immediately sets the film’s disorienting tone.   Strickland’s camera contemplates with fascination – nearly fetishises – the artefacts of a film studio and the tools of the sound mixer’s trade:  the ‘grid’, the packets of magnetic tape sheaths, etc.   The viewer is shown nothing of the crappy film that Gilderoy’s working on but he sees all:  the repeated viewings of lavish violence and sadism, far from desensitising him, heighten his anxieties and drive him into a continuous nightmare. The increasing lack of distinction between what’s happening inside and outside Gilderoy’s paranoid (or is it?) mind is reflected in seamless transitions between the worlds without and within his head – we also see things from his point of view.  The more conventionally satirical elements are amusing enough:  the lurid lines from the screenplay to give an idea of the scene that’s being worked on; the producer’s pretentious words about his movie output.  Strickland manages to make the English aspects of the piece both ludicrous and poignant.  These include Gilderoy’s mother’s infantilising letters to her son and a travelogue documentary short that one assumes he worked on in an earlier, more benign assignment.  The lighting and commentary on the Box Hill travelogue are spot on:  the comical plummy tones of its narrator contrast with the sense of escape from the increasingly claustrophobic studio in Italy that’s conveyed in the shots of green and pleasant Surrey countryside.  ‘The Lark Ascending’ on the soundtrack conveys Gilderoy’s longing for home.  (I wondered if there was a hint of autobiography here on the part of Strickland, who made Katalin Varga in a country whose language he couldn’t speak.)   As Gilderoy, Toby Jones is very good.  He expresses the man’s disintegration economically but powerfully and has some exquisite moments of inadequacy and discomfort.

Strickland’s deep fascination with the processes and objects of film-making is clearly enough to sustain not only him but the cinéastes who’ve raved about Berberian Sound Studio.   It wasn’t quite enough for me.  What happens to Gilderoy succeeds in being creepy but the most disturbing element is the infiltration of nightmare into the idyllic England of his memory – home thoughts from abroad are subverted by what abroad is doing to his head.   Strickland chooses to render this horror not through the lineaments of giallo but in the manner of an elaborately enigmatic art film.  The result of his preoccupation with style is that the core story is weakened.  That story is also unsurprising.  The studio is decidedly ominous from the start and everyone, including the film’s director (Cosimo Fusco), is openly hostile towards Gilderoy, except for the embittered star actress (Tonia Sotiropoulou) and the producer (Antonio Mancino).  (The latter’s easy charm could turn into something else – when he pops a grape into Gilderoy’s mouth, it’s seductive – but never does.  This works well.)  The delay in reimbursing Gilderoy for his air fare too quickly gets to the point of the studio accounts department’s claiming there never was such a flight from Heathrow.  In the climax to Berberian Sound Studio, reels of film are destroyed and Gilderoy’s work will have to start all over again.  The implication seems to be that he’s stuck for all eternity in the studio but you don’t feel the horror of Gilderoy’s fate.  This ending can also be read as Peter Strickland’s total absorption in making cinema.   Although I eventually felt disappointed by Berberian Sound Studio, I’ll look forward to Strickland’s next film:  he’s a true original in the stories that he wants to tell on screen.

28 April 2013