Noah Baumbach opens the Venetian festival with the adaptation of the inadaptable novel by Don DeLillo to achieve an exorbitant exercise in cinema between terror, comedy and spasm
There are films that are born with the condition and aspect of symptom. They are more epiphenomena than phenomena. Before fever than illness. If you will, and to dust off the classics, more ‘to-s’, for what they have of consciousness (of consciousness and representation of the world); that ‘and-s’, for its immediacy and properly mundane reality. the overwhelming ‘Background noise’, by Noah Baumbach is a good example. The best example perhaps. It would seem that the decision to open the Venetian Mostra with this impossible adaptation of the novel byDon DeLillo published in 1985 is surprisingly consistent in its wild incoherence.
Not in vain, we are before the most appropriate x-ray of a time –this one that is ours– that by dint of dematerializing itself, of losing taste and substance, of shedding from itself the most elemental privilege of the sense of time has ended up it will be nothing more than the distant reflection of probably nothing. It is not so much pessimism, or elitist and suffering catastrophism, as, indeed, background noise. And what is valid for reality, the hard, is exactly the same for cinema itself, the soft. How to understand that such a cerebral exercise that questions everything and that destroys everything ends up being the commercial flag of that temple of the stressful and thoughtless consumption that Netflix represents (she is the producer)? And at a film festival! Call it a paradox or, as we said, an epiphenomenon.
The director tells that just three years ago he surprised with ‘Story of a marriage‘ right here on the Lido, that DeLillo’s book fell into his hands at just the right time. “When I head to see”Ran‘ from Kurosawa came into my house ‘Background noise’“, he comments without being entirely clear about the relationship of one fact with another. The fact is that since then it has become an obsession (the novel, not samurai art). Looking a little closer, it is understandable. directed or written filmography of this convinced New Yorker lives trapped, between stupor and farce, in the perennial obsession with loss; in search, so to speak, of certainties (only the most obvious ones). And the enormous work of the writer also from New York has a lot of that: a patterned and polyphonic description of each of the supposed evidences that consume us in a society consumed by consumption; certainties that do nothing more than lead us to the simplest mistake.
Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig They are the protagonists of a story that tells in its own way an ecological disaster caused by a terrible accident. In reality, it does not narrate so much the catastrophe of the toxic cloud itself as the chaos that it suddenly produces in a community that lives happily on its own between perfectly stocked supermarkets and very excellent universities. Although in truth, no one’s life is counted as the nothingness of everyone’s life. Driver is a teacher who knows everything about Hitler and is beginning to know something about Elvis (both myths, he tells us, that are there to sublimate the legitimate fear of death) and Gerwig is a woman frightened to extremes that are hardly measurable by science. imminence of, precisely, death. Of course, any resemblance to these times of energy crises, migratory disasters and post-pandemics that they don’t stop is anything but a simple coincidence. Very briefly, the film essentially talks about death. Like all good ones, by the way.
With these and very misplaced elements, ‘Background noise’the film, manages to become a feverish state of mind that also refers to more elaborate terror than to comedy ‘slapstick‘ most obviously slammed. And it is there, in its physical impossibility, in its satisfied delirium, where it evidences each one of its achievements alongside each one of its limitations. Let’s say that the entire film is very aware of its happy contradiction and thus makes the viewer aware of it in the delicate excess of each one of its shots. Being contradictory, to hasten the argument, is part of the very structure of the plot to the most obvious point of exhaustion. That his production company is the platform that symbolizes like no other that the Bulmic vision oblivious to duration (to the experience of time and its limits) would be the icing on the cake of this prodigious oxymoron projected in a sinking city. Literally.
The philosopher told us that long ago we stopped producing objects for their use value to simply manufacture symbols, flags or labels. That is, nothing or almost nothing. And so, when we consume something, rather than satisfying a need, we limit ourselves to using a sign or, better, we are used by a code whose operation we barely understand and whose function is none other than, in a maximalist reading, to keep intact the emptiness that drives us. Background noise.
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