2023-07-04 23:09:00
In his second feature film mixing thriller and horror, Brazilian director Gregório Graziosi portrays an Olympic diver determined to resume her activity despite parasitic tinnitus.
The cinema, since the wet choreographies of Esther Williams and later the Hockneyians Plongeon by Frank Perry or Deep End by Skolimowski, maintains a bizarre and fascinated relationship with the swimming pool. Place of shimmering and shivering life in the simplest device, space of tiled metaphor, from sporting exploits to disturbing hygiene, from the anatomy of fierce relationships to split bodies. Presenting itself as a work mixing thriller and horror (elevated horror, high on the diving board), Tinnitus discovers at its opening a majestic graphic design, mixing the vertigo of a diving board (10 meters above the void) and symmetrical nightmare (the horizon blocked by plasma screens, swimmer clones in caps), more quirky than horrifying. We also understand that Tinnitus is not the name of a sea monster or a deity, between Titan and Neptune, any more than it is the code name of an occult operation for thrillers: it describes a tinnitus, characterized by “the perception of abnormal noises such as buzzing (low tinnitus), ringing (medium tinnitus) or whistling (high tinnitus)”.
Bouquet garni
In Gregório Graziosi’s second film, this tinnitus affects the heroine, Marina, a gifted Olympic diver, so badly that she has to give up her career, her discipline, and retrain. After the credits à la Saul Bass, featuring a green cricket caught in the red cells of an eardrum, Marina then became a pretty costumed mermaid who smiles while blowing bubbles in an aquarium, under the eyes of a few tourists. It is another attraction for “immersive” fiction, as the term is in vogue. Apart from apnea, in the middle of padded interiors or the deafening noise of São Paulo, the film seeks to immerse her (again) in a disturbing, exhausting sound bath, driving her almost mad. The story becomes uncertain of what she is hallucinating or experiencing, of her real suffering and her delirious obsessions: her former competition partner has replaced her with another, and Marina cannot bring herself to give way. The young woman returns to the charge, at the Olympic diving board, nourishing, depending on the moment, for her two rivals cruel or helpless affects, friendship, disdain, love and hatred, which the others reciprocate in this violent little game.
The film turns out to be more complicated and less captivating than promised, a sort of Persona by Bergman (poorly) mixed with Femme fatale and Carrie by De Palma, amniotic, colorized, overloaded with too many ideas. Her undeniable visual talent (all the mermaid scenes in particular) is mixed up, dealing with too many themes at once, producing an object that is more confused than abstract, an intellectual construction that resembles a bouquet garni: synchrony versus symmetry, couple versus partner, fascination versus horror, vertigo versus acusis, double versus “replica”, etc. Accumulation of petty and nasty personalities, of tense about-faces, formalism sometimes impressive, often empty. Last year, In shift of Juanjo Giménez Peña, worked by a similar acoustic universe and a narrative deviance, was stronger and less flashy, without flashy and with the ear.
Tinnitus by Gregório Graziosi, avec Joana de Verona, Indira Nascimento… 1 h 45.
#big #bath #Liberation