The Sounds of Silents

Rating: 9/10 (20 January 2012)

This light-footed and -hearted soufflé of a movie is a reminder of just how much fun it can be to go to the movies.
A film about a silent film star struggling with the transition to talkies that is itself a silent film is the kind of cutesy high concept premise that could go down in flames in the hands of the wrong team. But writer/director Michel Hazanivicius and his stars, Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo, know exactly how to sell the material so that it all works beautifully. What I liked most about the movie is that it doesn't spend all of its time winking to itself for its own cleverness, as you might expect it would. It doesn't use its silent film conventions to make any kind of commentary on silent films. Hazanivicius and company wanted to make a silent film because they thought it was the best way to tell this particular story, and that's just what they've done, without apologies.
Dujardin and Bejo are being lauded for their performances, and rightly so. It would be easy to dismiss their work as being unchallenging, but I have a feeling both had more difficult roles than one might first assume, and that the fact that they both make it look so easy is part of why they're so good. And the movie looks stunning -- one of the benefits of it being silent is that with words removed from the equation, the images take on extra responsibility to communicate the movie's ideas to us, and what cinephile could resist anything that makes a film more cinematic?
This film and "The Tree of Life" both for the moment stand at the top of my list of favorite films of 2011, and it's interesting to me that both are examples of films that let pictures rather than words tell their stories.
Grade: A