PRECIOUS METAL
British star Riz Ahmed beats out gold as a rock drummer going deaf
Sound Of Metal (15) Verdict: Thumpingly intense ★★★★I
Palm Springs (15) Verdict: Lively sci-fi rom-com ★★★II
EVEN if you were to watch the opening, pre-titles sequence in Sound Of Metal unaware that Riz Ahmed was in the running for Best Actor both at this weekend’s BAFTAs and at the Academy Awards later this month, you’d still know he was about to take you on an intense ride.
With badly bleached hair and a bare chest, his lean torso covered in tattoos (one of which reads ‘Please Kill Me’), Ahmed’s character Ruben sits over his drum kit at a gig, poised on the precipice of a percussive frenzy.
It’s not music as most of us know it, but it’s certainly noise.
A few feet away, Ruben’s girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke), the band’s singer and guitarist, starts screeching her lyrics. ‘Let me get there,’ she wails, over and over. The audience of thrash metal lovers are in dreamland. The rest of us are thinking, for heaven’s sake, will somebody just let her get there.
Then, blessed silence. Director Darius Marder has cut to the inside of a Winnebago, the mellow morning after the wild night before. Ruben is starting the day. He puts on a sweet-sounding blues record, makes healthy vegetable smoothies for them both and gently, lovingly, wakes Lou. It’s what’s known in literature as ironic counterpoint.
But we also see that Lou has a ladder of scars up her arm. Evidently, she has a history of self-harming. With hardly any assistance from actual dialogue, we are already invested in the lives of these two young people. It’s an arresting start to an excellent film.
Soon, the essence of the story becomes clear. Ruben is losing his hearing. Maybe silence isn’t so blessed after all, not that silence is what he is condemned to. Instead, he picks up dim, muffled, distorted sound, to which Marder, bravely, also subjects his audience. The version I saw came with subtitles, another masterstroke.
A doctor tells Ruben he needs to eliminate all exposure to loud noises, a devastating message for a drummer. Worse, he breaks the news that the hearing Ruben has lost will not return. The objective is to preserve what little he has left. Lou is concerned that the trauma will undermine Ruben’s recovery from heroin addiction. He has been clean for four years.
Encouraged by her, Ruben checks into a retreat for hearingimpaired people, run by Joe (Paul Raci), a grizzled, ponytailed, seenit-all guru. Joe is a recovering alcoholic who lost his hearing while serving in Vietnam, and Raci is terrific in a role he apparently got largely because he is himself a Vietnam vet who was raised by deaf parents and is fluent in American Sign Language.
Gradually, the two men form an uneasy bond as Ruben tackles the challenges of not just overcoming his resentment and learning how to communicate, not just addressing his imperilled relationship with Lou, but also embracing his condition.
He is hell- bent on getting expensive cochlear implants, an insult to Joe’s maxim that deafness ‘ is not a handicap, not something to fix’.
Sparsely, intelligently scripted by Marder and his brother Abraham, Sound Of Metal isn’t always easy to follow but never relaxes its grip, thanks mostly to Ahmed’s passionate central performance, which has distinct echoes of his turn as another embattled musician in the recent Mogul Mowgli. He really is an impressively vital, vibrant actor, who, for all that the late Chadwick Boseman leads the Best Actor betting in the forthcoming film awards, doesn’t deserve to play second fiddle to anyone. n PALM Springs is destined always to be judged in the long shadow of Harold Ramis’s classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day. It relies on the same central premise: Nyles (Andy Samberg), a worldweary guest at a desert wedding, finds himself living the same day over and over, and within the seemingly unbreakable time loop must both come to terms with his repetitive life and work out how to develop a romance with the bride’s sister, Sarah (Cristin Milioti).
However, those parallels don’t diminish Max Barbakow’s lively rom- com in the slightest. It is enhanced by a snappy script (by Andy Siara), a host of engaging performances, and the always welcome presence of J. K. Simmons, playing another wedding guest, Roy, who for complex reasons is also stuck in the time loop and wishes Nyles dead. Good, occasionally raunchy, always ingenious fun. Sound of Metal is available on Amazon Prime Video from Monday, and is in cinemas from May 17. Palm Springs is on Amazon Prime Video from today.