Mak­ing Noise Quietly

The debut fea­ture from the­atre direc­tor Dominic Drom­goole, based on a West End play by Robert Hol­man, Mak­ing Noise Qui­et­ly pro­ceeds along the same path as its name­sake, con­struct­ed from a trip­tych of sto­ries that cen­tre around con­ver­sa­tions between peo­ple about major mod­ern wars and their var­i­ous, trau­mat­ic knock-on effects.

The first sto­ry, ​‘Being Friends’, takes place in Kent dur­ing World War Two and fol­lows two young men who remain behind while their loved ones go to fight. Oliv­er Bell (Luke Thomp­son) is a Quak­er and a con­sci­en­tious objec­tor, Eric Faber (Matthew Ten­nyson), is an open­ly gay artist strug­gling with ill­ness. The con­ver­sa­tion between the two men is mel­low and restrained, prob­ing each oth­er with ques­tions about ide­ol­o­gy, lifestyle and sex­u­al­i­ty, speak­ing with a refresh­ing of mat­ter-of-fact­ness. It’s this and the third sto­ry, also named ​‘Mak­ing Noise Qui­et­ly’, that show the strongest work, the lat­ter bring­ing the film to a fair­ly sol­id con­clu­sion fol­low­ing a droll sec­ond act, a sto­ry about bereave­ment blunt­ly titled ​‘Cost’.

‘Cost’ is emblem­at­ic of where Mak­ing Noise Qui­et­ly gen­er­al­ly fal­ters, the trans­la­tion of stage per­for­mance to screen. No real advan­tage is tak­en of a medi­um where time, place and image is more flex­i­ble. Any salient points get lost in the film’s numer­ous mono­logues, all shot in long, sta­t­ic, unstim­u­lat­ing takes. While the iso­la­tion and length of each con­ver­sa­tion feels suit­able for the con­text it all feels a bit too lit­er­al – like a filmed table read of mate­r­i­al that, while fas­ci­nat­ing, isn’t car­ried over in a way that jus­ti­fies the adap­ta­tion. There are few impact­ful or even mem­o­rable images, aside from a fair­ly roman­tic close-up of the light­ing of a cig­a­rette, or a moment where a child mim­ics the vio­lence often enact­ed on him by his father.

The final seg­ment might be the most emo­tive, as it explores the long-term toll of com­mit­ting vio­lent acts while in ser­vice, as a Holo­caust sur­vivor (Deb­o­rah Find­lay) tries to fix the vio­lent and abu­sive rela­tion­ship between a sol­dier (Trys­tan Grav­elle) and his trou­bled, klep­to­ma­ni­ac son. It toes a provoca­tive line, dis­cussing what makes and becomes of trau­ma, rage and cycles of vio­lence, and whether it’s even pos­si­ble to heal it. It’s tricky, murky sto­ry­telling, that refus­es to paint a mon­strous man as an out­right mon­ster, pur­port­ing him as a vic­tim him­self, in some ways. His self-aware­ness and self-hatred at one point leads him to plead the woman to save his son from his tox­ic influence.

Mak­ing Noise Qui­et­ly con­fronts some inter­est­ing issues on state-endorsed vio­lence, but unfor­tu­nate­ly it’s rather restrict­ed by its lack of imag­i­na­tion. Its most abstract image (and prob­a­bly its corni­est), is that of a man sit­ting at a piano in a barn, con­nect­ing each sto­ry at inter­vals where he plays the score, as though it’s all unfold­ing on a stage before him. It acts as a sort of eerie reminder that ulti­mate­ly, Mak­ing Noise Qui­et­ly couldn’t escape its stage roots, pri­ori­tis­ing flat the­atrics over any cin­e­mat­ic quality.