Sound of Noise (2012)

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Sound of Noise (2010)An absurdist, zany, intense, unpredictable film. Rather amazing, really, if you can let go of an ordinary sense of plot and progression.At the center is a group of drummers who agree to perform a series of pieces by a cutting edge composer all around the city. But their instruments become found objects, heavy machinery, office items, hospital equipment (and hospital patient), so that their performances are intrusive, dangerous, illegal, and wonderfully outrageous.And funny. Sometimes you laugh aloud, sometimes you just are amused and amazed.In opposition to this group is a detective who grew up in a family of musicians but who is tone deaf. And he as a special ability to track the musical perps in their crimes--which you'll see. Kudos should also go to the filmmakers themselves, who make this craziness very fluid and beautiful. Contemporary Stockholm is shown as complex and beautiful and modern and not a Swedish Ikea stereotype. Finally there is a kind of interpersonal plot that is sort of fun and thin and helps hold the various performance pieces together. Maybe anything more intense on this score would have watered down the absurdist heights of the best of it, but this subplot does have a feel-good pops quality that the rest of the movie avoids. And it's the rest of the movie--mainly the "music" as it happens before your eyes--that is what counts. Great stuff!

I have not seen every movie ever made, but I'm fairly confident in my belief that there has never been one in which six anarchist musicians break into a hospital dressed as nurses, wheel a patient into an operating room, sedate him, and then perform a makeshift concert using everything in the room, including the patient's stomach, as a percussion instrument. "Sound of Noise" is one of the most refreshingly original oddities to come along in quite some time – a crime caper, a deadpan comedy, and a fantasy all rolled into one. The soundtrack is rhythmic and infectious yet curiously indescribable, as it rarely features traditional acoustic or electronic instruments. For unconventionality alone, composers Fred Avril and Magnus Börjeson (also one of the actors) may be deserving of an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score.The film, adapted by directors Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson from their 2001 short film "Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers," tells two separate yet related stories, both of which will cleverly converge in the final act. In the first story, we meet policeman Amadeus Warnebring (Bengt Nilsson), whose very name is the epitome of cruel irony; born into a family of musical prodigies, he grew up tone-deaf and ultimately developed a physical and psychological aversion to music altogether. He desires nothing more than a world of silence. This isn't to say he wants to become deaf. He just wants the music to stop. He's an embarrassment to his family, especially his brother, Oscar (Sven Ahlström), a respected conductor.In the second story, we meet Sanna Persson (which, conveniently, is also the name of the actress playing her) and her sidekick, Magnus (Börjeson), both of whom were expelled from a prestigious music academy some years earlier for their unorthodox musical philosophies. They both believe that the world is drowning in a sea of bad music. They resolve to compose their own brand of music, the likes of which the city won't soon forget. They recruit four drummers from various musical circles to assist them. Collectively dubbed the Six Drummers, they devise a "concert" consisting of four movements – which is to say, they will trespass into four different city locations and make an orchestra out of the available objects (think an antiestablishment retrofit of Stomp, and you've got it). The first movement is at the hospital, mentioned above. The second is at a bank, in which they use shredding machines, stamps, and coins in harmony. The tellers and customers are never held at gunpoint, but they are forced into being an audience.The Six Drummers leave a path of vandalism. Warnebring follows it, despite not being taken seriously by his fellow officers or superiors. As he goes from one location to another, led by clues hidden within the names of the movements, he becomes aware of a bizarre aural deficit: He can no longer register sound from any object or person touched by the Six Drummers. Take the hospital patient whose stomach became a drum; when Warnebring tries to question him, all he can see is an angry man moving his lips. He bangs on a bedpan yet hears no metallic clang. He passes a barking dog, and yet no bark emanates from its mouth. As this is happening, he accepts an invitation to attend a concert conducted by his brother. It takes less than twenty bars of music before he must excuse himself, for the sound of the orchestra is like sandpaper to his ears.I think the filmmakers were wise to not let little things like plausibility get in the way of the screenplay. I would not say the film is an emotional experience, although it certainly doesn't work on the mind. Like a child playing a game of make believe, the story freely bypasses the roadblocks of common sense and rationality and simply is. We're not supposed to question how the Six Drummers got hold of scrubs or bulldozers or diggers or jackhammers (wait until you see how those last three are utilized). We're not meant to analyze the physical or mental reasons for Warnebring's selective deafness. These plot lines are intended to be fun and freewheeling. You might even say the filmmakers move to the beat of a different drum.I have doubts about the ultimate fate of the Six Drummers, for it seems highly unlikely that true anarchists would suddenly and inexplicably be so compromising in their ways. As for Warnebring, I found his final scene charming yet bittersweet. What he considers a victory, I consider a tragic loss. But who am I question what makes someone happy? More to the point, why should I be critical when it was the only appropriate direction for the story to go in? For anyone who believes the movies have ceased to be unique, "Sound of Noise" will be like a shot in the arm. It's a revitalizing experience, not just as a story but also as a celebration of sound and music. Here is a film in which audiophiles should be just as entertained, if not more so, as avid movie watchers.-- Chris Pandolfi (www.atatheaternearyou.net)

My husband and I saw this tonight at the Seattle International Film Festival and we can't wait to be able to share it with our friends. The story is simple but endlessly creative: a group of musicians attempt to bring music to a city while a police officer attempts to get some much-needed peace and quiet.We enjoyed the touches of whimsy and magic and were increasingly impressed by each successive musical experiment. The dialogue, the visual cues, and, yes, the music itself kept us riveted to the screen. The movie was received well by the audience, who rewarded it with hearty laughter in many places and a long round of applause at the end.This film can be appreciated by everyone, from the highly musical (myself) to the tone-deaf (my husband)!

Give credit to Sound of Noise: despite dealing with such lofty themes such as the nature of music and its performance, it never becomes unnecessarily arty or academic. Instead, the movie has loads of quirky humour and an energetic plot, driven by a group of drummers-become-art-terrorists and their plan of turning everyday urban soundscapes into avant-garde percussion pieces. Bengt Nilsson does a nice performance as Amadeus Warnebring, a manic, tone-deaf and music-hating offspring of a family of classical pianists and conductors. The drummers are presented pretty much as caricatures of progressive musicians, but as such they're spot-on and funny. Even though the film-makers' sympathies are clearly on the side of the drummers, they're not above making gentle fun of avant-garde's excesses, and they're also surprisingly understanding of Warnebring's desire to live in a world of silence, with no music. The plot of the movie is slight, with some key elements left unexplained, but its fast-paced and constantly entertaining execution makes up for that. At the heart of Sound of Noise are the percussion pieces performed by the drummers, and they do not disappoint. The four performances seen in the film are awe-inspiring in their mise-en-scène, sound design and editing. For those scenes alone, Sound of Noise would be worth a view; as a whole, it's a quirky but easily-digested piece of pop art.