Noise Review
by Drew Turney
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Mention the words ‘Australian movie’ and many people will think of Crocodile Dundee
– the expression of an Australian archetype that doesn’t really exist
nowadays (if it ever did) but which was ingeniously packaged for
American audiences. No doubt they flocked here disappointed to see we
didn’t all wear croc-skin waistcoats, carry enormous hunting knives and
use words like ‘ripper’ and ‘bonzer’ in everyday conversation.
But
being Australian ourselves, it should be easy to depict the way
Australians really are in a film for local audiences, surely? Evidently
not. It’s not until you see TV director Matthew Saville’s Noise
that you realise how few Australian films capture us as we are; the way
we talk, the names we have, the jobs we work at, the way we relate.
It’s
the strongest element in Saville’s feature debut, a rather Lynchian
tale of colliding lives. There’s police officer Graham (Cowell)
suffering tinnitus – a constant ringing in the ears. Young Maia
(Lavinia Smart) is the sole survivor of a late night train massacre.
Lavinia’s frightened for her life as the police stumble. Graham is sent
to monitor a small town where more murders have rocked the local
community.
Part of the way through you might assume you’re
watching a murder mystery or a thriller. Failing that, you might be
waiting for Graham’s condition to come to the fore and give the flawed
hero his Achilles heel.
But thriller elements never come to the
fore, nor does an easily marketable figure in Graham, and many will
come out of the film trying to work out what Saville wanted to say.
The lack of a cinematic definition might give Noise trouble
finding an audience who want to know what it’s about before they see
it. Saville himself reports how much trouble he had cutting the trailer
so as to not make it look like something it wasn’t. Putting your finger
on what Noise is is much harder.
It’s
not a murder mystery or a thriller despite some action and thriller
elements. It’s not even a archetypal tale of lives crossing like last
year’s Last Train to Freo.
It’s
an unapologetically artistic film; beautiful to look at and experience,
and the sound design captures Graham’s condition perfectly, putting us
right in his shoes.
And Saville indeed gets his characters and
their particular Australian-ness pitch perfect. Just as you have no
real idea what people are thinking, you won’t understand the
motivations of most of the characters most of the time, left to – as
Saville says he wants it – ask more questions than you can answer.
See Noise
for the confident command of the cinematic language more than the
story. If you want a three act plot that wraps up a narrative, you’ll
be disappointed. 2.5 out
of 5 Noise
Australian
release: 3rd May,
2007
Cast: Brendan Cowell, Maia Thomas
Director: Matthew Saville
Website: Click
here.
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