Ruben (Riz Ahmed, also nominated for best male interpretation) bangs on his drums, crates and cymbals, like a lumberjack or like a deaf one might say if, in his case, the expression did not end up being unhappy. At the same time, Lou (Olivia Cooke), snatches hoarse sounds on her guitar. Amps pushed to the maximum. The melody does not matter, only the energy and the rhythm emerge from this magma. At two, they make noise like four.
Heavy metal duo on the stage, couple in the city, they tour in small venues across the United States and live, like in a bubble, in a motorhome equipped with all the comforts. They are, according to the director Darius Marder of which it is the first fictional feature film, representative “The little American dream that locks us in a cocoon”. This vehicle is both their stronghold and their only asset. He isolates them, but protects them from the outside world that he sees scrolling through the windows.
Soon Ruben doesn’t even hear him anymore, the world… One concert evening when they didn’t play louder than usual, Ruben, suffered from tinnitus, those parasitic noises that no outside sound provokes. Soon his hearing went down. When consulted, the doctors are categorical. The drummer must put away his chopsticks and join an establishment specializing in the reception of the hearing impaired where he will have to learn to live according to his condition. In Ruben’s case, it is less about healing than accepting his condition. There will be no miracle in Alabama …
Being deaf is one thing, accepting it is another
Adaptation will be difficult. The couple go their separate ways, the first step for Ruben with such a gentle gaze on a long road to a new identity, the film of which attempts to identify the advances, the renouncements, the failures. To be deaf is one thing, to accept it is another. The young man will do everything to escape the condition that is now his and find Lou, returned to live with his father (strange Mathieu Amalric) in Paris. Even if he has to sell the motorhome …
But the main interest of the film is less in its scenario than in the way in which it manages, thanks to an impressive work on the sound, to immerse the spectator in the world of its hero. Deafness is not silence. It is crossed by stridencies, squeaks, crackles, incomprehensible and distorted noises. Darius Marder has succeeded in reconstituting this world of almost silence in which Ruben is now locked. Just like him, we perceive these borborygmes to which conversations are reduced. Just like him we listen, plagued by the same feeling of annoyance, anger and finally exclusion.
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