It’s difficult to apply one or even a few apt descriptors to Vietnamese director Lê Bảo’s atmospherically adventurous mood piece “Hearing.” The film, which premiered in the festival’s main competition, defies strict categorization. Rather, this multi-generational survey of a family beset by decades of an agreed-upon silence moves with a stunning clarity that recalls recent splendors like “Viet and Nam” and “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.” Like those immersive works, “Hearing” relies on an excellent combination of hypnotic sights, penetrating sounds, and soulful evocations of unhealed fissures to whisk the viewers onto a woozy journey of discovery. Such filmic playfulness is best displayed in the picture’s technically precise and wholly enveloping opening. There, we’re dropped into a lively restaurant whose clattering of voices inspires Ninh (Nguyễn Quốc Tuấn), a mechanic, to install decibel meters that light up blue (sometimes in the film it’s also violet and indigo) whenever it gets too loud. From there we’re transported to florists located on the floor above who appear to be frozen by the noise. One neighbor is so incensed by the racket, he throws a flower pot from his balcony, which only leads to a brief lull in the hubbub. Lê spends the entirety of his film juxtaposing scenes like these, particularly in smaller villages where the rank-and-file workers of all ages go to party to booming club music, with moments of austere silence. While the latter’s quiet appearance might suggest tranquil calm, plenty of buried angst still causes disquiet among our primary cast. [full capsule review via RogerEbert]
