Among the nominees for Best Actor at the Oscars this year, there are three that impressed me a lot. In addition to Anthony Hopkins, who won the second time, and the "Black Panther" who unfortunately lost, there is another one that caught my eye. British actor Riz Ahmed . The Pakistani-Muslim actor and rapper, who starred in commercials such as The Bourne 5 and Rogue One, is now playing a deaf rock drummer in The Sound of Metal. He rose to fame and was nominated for a number of Best Actor in Oscar season. Coincidentally, his character is as flawed as Hopkins' "Father Trapped in Time," and both films use the protagonist's first-person perspective , leading the audience to immerse the audience in the patient's role. The inner world, from which you can experience the characters' anxiety and difficult survival predicament.
Different from "Father Trapped in Time", which uses a narrative that disrupts time and space to present the protagonist's memory loss, the outstanding feature of "The Sound of Metal" lies in the design and processing of the sound , which gives people a refreshing feeling. Simulating the situation after the protagonist is suddenly deaf, the screen is suddenly silent, only seeing the rotation of the juice machine, the water jet from the shower head falls on him, and then the screen follows the protagonist to the drugstore full of sound. The images in which silent and normal sounds alternately appear, secretly explain the transformation of subjective and objective viewpoints , and the audio-visual expression technique is quite amazing.
Later, the plot in the hearing-impaired mutual aid community was even more ingenious in sound processing. A whole room of people sits at the dining table to communicate with violent and exaggerated sign language and the sound of knocking on the table, while the protagonist and the little boy use tapping on the metal slide to feel the rhythm of the vibration frequency, and the scene where he leads the children to beat drums is even more so. In this way, the audience can feel the emotional fluctuations of the characters through the external voice. At the Oscars that just ended, the film successfully won the best sound effect award , which is enough to prove that this method has its originality.
Although both the title and the poster make people think it's a biography of a rock musician, it's not. Riz Ahmed's brilliant performance of a drummer who is accidentally deaf, goes from passive resistance to gradually confronting reality and finally coexisting peacefully with his disability. At first glance, it looks like the kind of inspirational theme of the disabled, but in fact it has gone to the opposite of this common type of Hollywood. A musician who has lost the hearing he relies on for a living is naturally embarrassing, but the focus is not on the process of how the male protagonist tries to restore his hearing, but spends a lot of space describing how he learned sign language at the Mutual Help Center for the Hearing Impaired and overcoming his inner feelings. commotion. From this, the theme is revealed: physical defects are very common, the key is to bravely accept and face one's own defects , learn new survival skills, and find a new life, rather than nostalgic for the past.
This is interestingly confirmed in the relationship between the protagonist and his girlfriend. Previously, the two partnered on tour, contracted the chronic disease of drug use, and occasionally self-harmed. It was this sudden "deafness" that gave the two the opportunity to re-examine this morbid relationship. The reversal at the end suggests that the rebellious rich girl in the past will become a good girl, and the male protagonist suddenly realizes that the two cannot go back to the days when they were rambunctious in the past. They finally understand how to reconcile with their physical defects and the past, and welcome a new life. From sudden deafness, to cochlear implantation to restore hearing, to removal of cochlear to restore deafness, this anti-type design makes the film's conception and expression more profound and intriguing than the same type of subject matter.
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