Noise. It is everywhere. And its presence seems to irritate everybody. That is exactly the reason why the American director Henry Bean made a movie addressing loud annoying sounds called noise.
Have you ever dreamt of smashing up that because of that irritating noise you hear? Keep your cool and just watch Bean's new movie...
"Noise," Bean's provocative second film, casts Tim Robbins as David, an upper-class family man driven insane by New York's loud sounds - grinding garbage trucks, horns honking, back-up beepers and worst of all, car alarms squealing at all hours, reported Reuters. He becomes so obsessed with noise that he turns into a black-clad vigilante, "The Rectifier," waging his own crusade on those damn alarms shattering his quiet.
After ending in jail and nearly sinking his marriage, he decides to try to go about his fight legally, collecting signatures for a petition which he hopes will get the issue on the ballot at an upcoming council election, the report continued. The initiative is immensely accepted but is restricted by the city's slimy mayor, played by William Hurt, forcing David to resort to an intense strategy to stress his point.
"Going out to break into a car whose alarm had been going off for hours, getting arrested, going to jail, appearing before a judge, all that happened to me, I did that," Bean told reporters after his film premiered at the Rome festival to critical acclaim.
"When I got arrested I had already been doing it a lot. I had been doing it for years. But when I spent the night in jail and it cost me several thousands dollars, I began to think I wasn't getting anywhere by pursuing it in this way," he said. "I confess that a couple of times I could not control myself afterwards and I went out and did it again and didn't get arrested those times... In fact you'll never find a policeman who will tell you that these things (car alarms) do any good whatsoever."
The film is the director's clever and hilarious second installment in a trilogy exploring religious, political and artistic fanaticism. Bean's first film "The Believer," which centers on a Jewish man who becomes a neo-Nazi skinhead, won the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance festival in 2001 but was so controversial that no major American distributor picked it up.
Despite Bean's own personal scuffle against auto alarms, which according to him "should be totally illegal," the director said his film was, above all, about the disconnect that he feels exists between those in power and their citizens.
"For me, noise becomes a metaphor for power. The noise that I have to listen to, that I have no control over, that invades my house, my ears, my thoughts... in a way that's how our governments are," he concluded. "We live in a world where the governments are extremely unresponsive to what the citizens want."
