“Background noise” is everywhere. Ubiquitous and atomic, it is also in the absurd protocol of a film festival, in the consumerist desire of the movie buff who zaps between popular and elitist culture like someone who buys in a hypermarket. Five hours to book tickets online, security guards blocking your way due to undetermined circumstances, skyrocketing prices while diners smile as they pull out their credit cards. “Noise in the background”, the novel and, of course, the adaptation of Noah Baumbach in which they star Adam Driver Y Greta Gerwig, is the 79th edition of the Venetian Mostra. It was very timely, therefore, that it was inaugurated under the umbrella of Netflix, a post-capitalist platform that, this year, is competing with three more titles in the contest (among them, the long-awaited “Bardo”, by Gonzalez Inarrituand “Blonde” by Andrew Dominik). If the consumer society helps us overcome our fear of death, perhaps a film festival will too.
The fact is that the event’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, has managed to overcome that fear, so present in the last two years, with a festival at full capacity, without reduced capacity or draconian security measures. Hardly anyone practices the poetics of masks anymore, and Venicewhich was the only festival that did not cancel its celebration during the pandemic, has already established itself as the launching pad for the films that are going to focus the conversation on nominations for the oscars. Barbera lamented not having been able to convince Universal to present “The Fabelmans” at the Mostra, Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical fiction that will premiere in Toronto, but has Dominik, González Iñárritu, Baumbach, Todd Field, Luca Guadagnino, Darren Aronofsky, Paul Schrader; five female directors in competition; a luxurious forewoman of the jury (Julianne Moore), with Rodrigo Sorogoyen as a partner in deliberation; a very Spanish president of Orizzonti (Isabel Coixet); Penélope Cruz in two titles, one Italian (“L’immensità”) and the other Spanish (“In the margins”); Already Catherine Deneuve, who yesterday received the Golden Lion for her entire career.
Regarding “Background Noise”, Noah Baumbach has been practical, as he was Cronenberg when he adapted “Cosmópolis”, also from a novel by Don DeLillo. Impossible to improve the dialogues of the American writer, which fall on the viewer like a rain of slogans and aphorisms whose musicality alone builds the changing tone of the story. Baumbach has copied them because he knew he needed his intellectual strength, but also his ferocious poetics, which, in some cases, unfortunately, is not up to par with his staging.
Unrepentant cinephile, staunch fan of the work of Godard and Antonioni, DeLillo wrote “Background Noise” in 1985 under the influence of the schizophrenic narrative of television and advertising, adapting, from a fragmented, delocalized and abstract literature, the critique of capitalism from Godard’s militant cinema. It is not surprising that Baumbach ends his film with a splendid musical scene in a supermarket (with a fantastic theme from LCD Soundsystem), which may remind us of the mythical back and forth tracking shot in a supermarket in “Todo va bien”. Perhaps Godard -or the more clinical and Bressonian Cronenberg- would have known better how to capture the Martian formal self-absorption of DeLillo’s novel. Baumbach, as he confessed at a press conference, has preferred to focus on the cinema of the eighties, with which he grew up, and which is so important in films such as “A Brooklyn Story” or “Greenberg”: “In a certain sense, “Noise in the background” is also a story of American culture. And the movies I saw at that time have made me the filmmaker that I am.”
One year before Chernobyl
Being scrupulously faithful to the text, Baumbach has found himself faced with the challenge of adapting a tentacular novel, which is many things at once: a terrifying sitcom, a dystopian fable, a parody of the academic world (where Hitler Y Elvis elbow each other to be the stars of the Cultural Studies department), a conspiracy thriller, a meditation on the idea of happiness among the glittering ruins of a car accident or a castle of fried tomato cans. Except in the final section, too hasty, and where Baumbach does not know how to graduate the sudden tonal change of the novel, to the point of softening the ambiguity of his narcotic apocalyptic utopia, the result is very satisfactory, especially during the magnificent episode of the Gladley family fleeing from a chemical cloud that threatens an entire community, in a panic. “Background noise” was published one year before Chernobylbut his discourse on contemporary fears -and that is why Baumbach has respected the period in which the novel takes place- accurately announces those of the Covid era.
The director of “Story of a Marriage” has understood that, beyond the circumstantial, what unites the multiple registers of DeLillo’s masterpiece is something that belongs to all of us: the fear of death. That death that is nothing more than documents changing hands. That odd death. That death that is a sound, perhaps that of the automatic doors of a supermarket. That death to which we are all heading, with rhyming steps, en masse, while listening to a sociopath or looking for a saint or taking a pill to beat it. “Background noise” tells us that no matter how much we invent hope, death will always be there, between deodorants and dishwasher detergent.
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