A colossal disappointment - could have been a great film

Rating: 3/10 (2 February 2012)

I give the producers and director enormous credit for being so bold as to make a SILENT, BLACK & WHITE feature in the year 2011. Jean DuJardin deserves all the awards there are for his fabulous embodiment (veritable channeling!) of a long list of great silent leading men, including Douglas Fairbanks (Senior & Junior!), Rudolf Valentino, Ramon Navarro, etc. But sadly there are a number of key flaws in the realization of this film that completely derail the extraordinary possibilities it offered. For one thing, the director seems not to know that silent films never played at natural speed. Much is made of the fact that silent films were shot at 16 frames per second and sound films at 24 frames per second. While this is a fact, makers of silent films all "undercranked" in order to perk up the action. The cameras were even designed to do this because, early on, they became aware that real-time -- without the realism of spoken dialog -- came across as very tedious. And that's exactly what this film is -- tedious. Furthermore, since the movie does eventually break its silence, I must say that the time for that to happen should have been MUCH earlier in the film. It would have been a wonderful touch for sound and dialog (and the revelation of the leading man's accent) to happen at the time that it becomes apparent that sound films have taken over at the box office. Instead, this movie draws it out -- way out -- until the leading man has finally accepted the way of history. It's terribly anticlimactic by then and comes way too late to make a point. Now here's a tip: just to test how this film would play slightly sped up, in the authentic style of silent movies, I watched it again. This time while in PLAY mode I pressed the ">>" SCAN button just once, to speed up the picture. Voila! Suddenly it's very entertaining -- especially the part with the dog! If you're not a fast reader, you may have to pause briefly to read the narrative cards, but this is the way I would recommend viewing the film. I'm not joking. The music is not affected -- and you will be finished sooner as well.