Review of Touch the Sound (2004) by Bobby O — 24 Oct 2005

This is a documentary about a woman named Evelyn Glennie who's a Grammy-winning classical percussionist. The hook is that she's profoundly deaf. At first I thought, whoa, that's pretty incredible, how can she play if she can't hear? But then it occurred to me, wasn't Mozart deaf too? So I did a quick google just to be sure and discovered that no, it was actually Beethoven who was deaf. But either way. It's been done.

So the thing about this movie is that even though it's purportedly about Glennie, she doesn't actually talk very much. But when she does, she proves to be a real space cadet. She opines that the opposite of sound isn't silence, that silence is one of the loudest sounds, that hearing is really a form of touch, that we all have a sixth sense that kicks in if we lose another one, and that every sound lives on forever although she doesn't know what happens to them. I'm guessing that she's never taken a physics class.

Much of time the camera isn't actually on Glennie. As she travels around the world to New York, California, Scotland, and Japan to play with various musicians, we're treated to long shots of cityscapes and nature scenes without music or voiceovers. Taxis blow their horns, trains rumble by overhead, a jackhammer jacks or hammers or whatever it is they do, birds chirp, dogs bark, a brook babbles. The world is a very loud place.

When we're not listening to nature sounds, we're watching Glennie hitting random things with sticks or, just to mix it up, rubbing them with violin bows. She and this other guy partner up and rent this huge warehouse in Germany to use as a recording studio and they have a field day running around whacking things to see what sounds they make. Later they take turns throwing rolls of adding machine tape from the gangway on the second floor. I don't know why. It's a very confusing movie.

At one point I couldn't take it anymore so I fell asleep. I dropped in and out of consciousness for a while but I don't think I missed much. When I came fully to, the world was still demonstrably loud, in part due to Glennie's prolific production of what she believes are immortal sounds.

When Glennie bangs on conventional things like drums and xylophones, it becomes clear that she's really very good at what she does. Her sessions with a bunch of Japanese percussionists are the best part of the movie. But there's far too much nonsense about the nature of sound and there are far too many recordings of the sounds of nature.

My roommate in college had one of those alarm clocks that lulls you to sleep with your choice of nature sound motifs. You could choose from the ocean, the rainforest, a babbling brook, and so on. The thing used to drive me nuts because if you listen to it for long enough, you eventually pick up on the pattern. So instead of falling asleep I'd be lying there thinking "here comes that damn screeching bird again".

Uhh, so what was my point again? I guess I have no point. I just wanted to share this very special movie-inspired memory.

But that's neither here nor there. The bottom line is that I didn't like this movie very much, as you can probably tell. Glennie may be the greatest percussionist who ever lived and brava to her for overcoming her deafness, but remarkable people don't necessarily translate into interesting movies. And this one was a real yawner.