Originally from Brooklyn, where he was born fifty-three years ago, Noah Baumbach is part of a current of independent New York cinema whose reputation has long remained confidential, for lack of finding relays in a Hollywood industry which he rejected, any way, just about all expected. Hollywood’s evolution toward a superhero theme park monoculture and Baumbach’s fidelity to its intimate, scholarly, and family-oriented inclinations only served to further the divorce.
Taking advantage of the opportunity presented to him with the development of platforms, primarily Netflix, he found an unexpected freedom and resonance there, crystallized with the cruel and remarkable divorce film, Marriage Story, produced in 2019 and bringing together Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver and Laura Dern. There is little doubt that this film, with the tasty Uncut Gems (2019), by the Safdie brothers (also from New York independence), is one of the few rare but indisputable jewels that the platform can claim to date.
Baumbach would therefore have been wrong to renounce the delights prized by tortuous souls. His new film, scheduled on Netflix from Friday December 30, is thus inspired by the homonymous novel White Noise (Background noise, translated into French by Stock, in 1986) by the postmodernist writer Don DeLillo, whose taste for experimentation will have found with this title published in the United States in 1985, for the first time, the path of critical recognition and popular. Adam Driver plays Jack, an eminent pioneer of Hitler studies at a Midwestern university, who takes German lessons on the sly ahead of an international conference on the subject, because he has never actually heard anything about it. that language.
Ambient consumerism
That is to say if Jack is a figure of the simulacrum, in this completed by his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig, also the filmmaker’s companion), as well as by the string of children who make up this recomposed American family, mired in a mud of interrupted sentences, domestic noises, point-blank dialogue, trivial activities and continuous information. This “background noise” of the world, both discreet and deafening, constitutes not only the immediate environment of the family, but the very material of the film, little by little disturbed by gaps which tear its comforting fabric.
Everything in the film revolves more or less around the fear of death within a secularized society which gives itself the illusion of immortality.
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