Some french guy is a mute and is in a bunch of silent movies in the 20's. He meets a french lady who also has a volume problem and wants to be in the movies alongside her silent heroes. They then use over the top facial expressions and the occasional written bit to tell the story of how talking is starting to be introduced but he doesn't want to talk in films however she does and John Goodman also thinks its a cracking idea but the french guy resists and thinks he knows better but turns out he doesn't, idiot. O yeh and none of them talk, ever.
This film won a lot of awards, like a bunch of super special ones meaning it should be a good film, right? Every year the awards season flags up certain films that we should all see for various reasons and for the most part they're wrong. Some of the shite that has won awards is in fact pretentious and frankly boring. This unfortunately is both. To start the story isn't original which by movie standards doesn't actually mean a lot but in an award winning film it should be a little more original. The story is the same as Singin' in the Rain which is one of my favourite films of all time, not really a good indicator I would like this version then. The acting is frankly annoying with the actors having to over accentuate every single facial expression so that we know what the hell they are going on about. Also a failing of silent cinema is the fact that music has to accompany it, again in itself not a problem but the music in this is really quite annoying and I just wished they had turned the volume down once in a while for a bit of respite. I don't have anything against silent cinema and it is historically very important for the entire film industry but I feel that in this case it is a gimmick. By that I mean that if it wasn't a silent film then nobody would really care about it and it certainly wouldn't have won all the awards it did. Its a shame because I wanted to like it but just couldn't get on board.
Verdict: 1.5/5
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