Saying that a movie about engineering sound for the movies has limited appeal is being optimistic. But if that ode to Foley is also a stylish homage to Italian B horror flicks of the '70s, it will find an audience. And if that homage is also a Lynchian reality warp, critical kudos will follow.
British director Peter Strickland has made that film. His Berberian Sound Studio is a movie about sound mixing and Italian horror that grows increasingly surreal as it unfolds. It stars one of Britain’s top character actors, Toby Jones. He plays Gilderoy, a shy and awkward British technician hired by an Italian studio to supervise sound on a picture called The Equestrian Vortex, a trashy story about the ghosts of witches haunting a girls riding academy. Sound affects are generated the old-fashioned way, with the sickening scrunch of a human skull being axed simulated by chopping watermelons.
Gilderoy, whose resume includes children’s shows and nature documentaries, is appalled by the project and unnerved by everyone he encounters. “Excuse me, do you speak…?” he begins. “No,” snaps the sexy receptionist (Tonia Sotiropoulou), cutting him short. The producer, Francesco (Cosimo Fusco), is saturnine, dodgy with money but demanding. “You cooperate. You don’t question. You don’t argue. You just do as you’re told to do and keep your personal opinion where it belongs,” he informs Gilderoy. The gregarious but predatory director, Santini (Antonio Mancino), flashes hot when Gilderoy mentions that he thought the movie was about horses, not horror. “This is not horror film!” the director insists. “This is a Santini film… This is history,” an allusion to the film’s depiction of the medieval torture of witches by Roman Catholic authorities.
Making a film about torture turns into torture as Gilderoy records the sound of vegetables boiling to suggest unspeakable mayhem. Overworked, insecure and out of place, the soundman goes quietly bonkers.
Evident throughout Berberian Sound Studio is a love for the analog technology of an era not so long ago—not just the magnetic tape and Revox recorders but the receptionist’s typewriter and rubber stamps are subject to an appreciative gaze. With Gilderoy’s meticulous methods scrutinized up close, the process of sound mixing in incorporated into a story of mounting unease eventually shading into nightmare.
