Hearing

The protagonist of Hearing installs devices that activate a blue light when a certain sound level is reached. Ninh is a zealous agent of a preventive strategy that should hinder violence in public and private spaces. During the course of the film, we discover that this strategy is a fundamental piece in the mosaic of his own life, because he was a violent husband in the past. Ninh’s present is marked by solitude and regret, even if he is still not able to explicitly apologise and thus accomplish his repentance.

Ninh’s situation and emotions give the tonality to Lê Bao’s entire film, whose rhythm is particularly slow, almost artificially slow, as if the peace that each scene of the film expresses were the result of a great effort of inhibition. Also through a sculptural quality of the photography and a scene décor that recalls Ros Andersson’s films, the film explores the lives of several secondary characters, starting with Ninh’s family members, and their different ways of dealing with non-violent behaviour. From this perspective, Hearing shows a world where peace and repression coalesce.

I think that this is a particularly original gesture by Lê Bao, if we consider that Southeast Asian cinema has often polarised violence and peace as alternatives that exclude each other. Is there peace without repression? Ninh seems to hope so, and his attitude appears coherent with ancient Buddhist practices or the smooth oneirism à la Apichatpong Weerasethakul. But the film takes us in another direction, where the apparent harmony reveals itself as unsustainable. Ninh’s preventive strategy of containment is destined to crack, giving him the opportunity to express his suffering and ask for pardon.

With this dramaturgical evolution concerning Ninh and his family drama, it is the entire film and all its characters that experience a liberation from several forms of repression. A symptom and symbol of this liberation is the loudness of sounds (I let here an important series of other symbols aside, for I lack the necessary cultural references – Hearing is not a film just for the Western audience…). The scene in which the people of a rural village happily and clumsily dance to loud disco music is especially iconic – a sort of slap in the face of Apichatpong and his emulators? This liberation should not be interpreted as a plea for violence, of course, but as the confession of the impossibility of living an immaculate and perfectly quiet life – which is probably just the projection of urban people onto the rural world. While Ninh surrenders and overcomes his pride and his introversion, Lê Bao seems to suggest another way of dealing with violence: recognising it and channelling it into respectful, extroverted modalities. For example, dancing.

Hearing is a film that espouses non-violence and lets it crack from within. Peace and harmony cannot be reached through repression or solely through work on our inner world. They require the turmoil of souls to be expressed, mistakes to be communicated, and the joy of life to be spoken aloud.