Berberian Sound Studio

There came a point early into the film where Gilderoy (Toby Jones) is almost apathetic after much verbal and manipulative abuse from his Italian giallo producer, his face lost and far distance, entrapped in his own headspace, wanting to be anywhere but in a Rome studio trying to piecemeal horrifying sounds depicting the worst kinds of enacted violence. He was tricked into the flight, too. Should he have known what he was getting into, this sound effects wiz would have stayed home in his native England. But Berberian Sound Studio is far more than just a throwback studio insiders film; its gradual descent into a maddening surreality where Gilderoy could be becoming a part of the very giallo he’s layering sound for gets so wonderfully strange and challenging. It is a film that is hypnotic and compelling when it parlays the studio process to us, with the innerworkings of a pretentious group of snobbish filmmakers making a misogynistic and cruel horror film but acting as if it is “a real depiction of the human condition”. This while some of the foley crew smashes melons in order to mimic slashed throats and flesh…the director, a flashy womanizing showman who emits radiating winsome confidence and true belief in his product, seems rather sinister while the producer, quite frankly, is a real asshole who demeans you and talks down to you if opinions are offered or performances (the actresses especially get hammered aplenty, along with Gilderoy) aren’t “up to par”. I often wondered just why Gilderoy would tolerate such grievous attitude towards him. The request for his flight to Italy to be reimbursed (as it should be, considering he was hired by the studio to help them out) is received so poorly, Gilderoy is disregarded by them. Hell, the studio finds his request insulting (he deserves to be paid for the flight!).

But this film will be discussed and analyzed to death for how it twists into something quite heady and outré. Some, I have noticed, have even said it becomes a film-within-a-film times 4. Whatever you believe (that certain mommy issues hinted at in letters he receives and reads, while home is vitally important to him no matter where he is for significant reasons, or that Gilderoy was “absorbed” into the very film he was preparing sound for), I think the underlying tension and oppression that seems to be overtaking Gilderoy (he was in a foreign studio with a language, for a time, is alien to him) and how the studio tasks themselves are so alluringly photographed (buttons, videotape, the light from a camera lens, the voice artists in a sound booth getting into character, the fruits destroyed, the crushing sounds as they develop this unnerving quality that gets under the skin).

The fade into white as Jones is so browbeaten and defeated at the end there seems to be nowhere to go, his eventual ability to speak Italian and understand his studio cohorts, the receipt of a piece of watermelon from one of the foley crew members (some consider this accepting a pact with evil!), his steady deterioration thanks to mistreatment and disrespect (and when he’s told he didn’t take a flight he’s seeking reimbursement for), the demands of the studio to get exactly what the producer wants and when imperfect according to him how he reacts hostilely, and the outrageous dynamic where business and pleasure are often at war with each other (a friend of the director’s often arrives party-hearty much to the producer’s dismay, while the director appears both seemingly serious about his work, at the same time a bit distracted by the celebrity (whatever that is in his narcissistic, egotistical mind) of the lofty position) in the studio are essential ingredients within the makeup of the film’s projection (pun intended) of a protagonist’s mental decline. All these are tangible links in how Gilderoy suffers mental ruination.

There’s a break. Perhaps a psychotic break. Gilderoy has an alliance (not a dalliance, although it gets close) with an actress who is equally mistreated as him. She has defied the advances of the director although his attempts are numerous. The producer finds her screams in the sound booth ineffective. That’s putting it mildly. The producer is basically an ornery piece of shit. He’s assertively belligerent and bluntly brutish with his verbal insulting. Gilderoy could be viewed as respected as the janitor. At one point, when the actress purposely and vengefully destroys a lot of the footage from the movie, the producer balks at Gilderoy to clean it all up. Gilderoy, at this point, has taken all of the disrespect dutifully and maturely. Few would stomach his shit like Gilderoy does. The actress bombards her own career, but her confession to Gilderoy that she is nothing more than a whore to the studio folks is an admittance that perhaps there was nothing more for her anyway.

Around the 71 minute mark, the film takes a turn I can’t imagine any viewer expects. The film is quite unique…there’s nothing quite like it. It detours in strangland never to return. Mom’s letter to Gilderoy at first seem innocuous, but birds torn to pieces supposedly by magpies, Gilderoy seeing himself played by a camera onto a screen, and film distorted into a parallel “reality”, Berberian Sound Studio takes on a new identity so unexpected, I was jarred by it…in a good way. He is attacked by a woman in a cottage, while he and the producer watch the footage from a studio room speaking to each other in Italian! There is documentary footage he had sound work in shown to us. The letter of murdered birds indicates a dark side to Gilderoy and a new hired actress “goes over her lines” with mum’s words reaching out from her lips to his ears, reiterating their significance to him in this “new reality”.

I don’t think this will be for all tastes. In fact, I think the film will frustrate, and maybe even infuriate. A situation where a studio derides, accuses, belittles, and barks amongst themselves, where a director and producer don’t see eye to eye but care even less about their actresses (the “alternate studio reality” has the producer encouraging Gilderoy to juice up some white noise to terrorize their newly hired actress into screaming in a pitch they so desire!), and how this place of disorder worsens Gilderoy’s state of mind distorts into a different film as the sound maestro becomes the “star” of the film he considers repulsive could be a bit much for some viewers. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

****/*****