Hear My Song

Commonweal, April 10, 1992 by Richard Alleva

Peter Chelsom, the writer-director of the new Irish comedy, Hear My Song, doesn't have to keep his feet on the ground. He's a cloudwalker of the utmost agility. It's no use detailing his movie's plot, for the script is a piece of deliberate nonsense about a young concert promoter's search for a famous tenor who has become a recluse after a traumatic brush with the law. After some mishaps on the road, the hero's sidekick mutters, "We're in a shaggy dog story." Indeed, so is the movie's audience but such is the powerful gaiety of Chelsom's direction that it would take a very dull and overly rationalistic creature to wish himself anywhere else while watching this giddy pipedream.

Chelsom's style is hard to describe because it reconciles so many opposites. His way of staging pub brawls and hijinks is so corny that I'm tempted to think that Chelsom has simply seen too many John Ford movies. Yet he is also capable of staging a slapstick scene, involving a cow and the deepest well in Ireland, that incorporates so many colliding elements of farce, fantasy, and downright terror that you don't know whether to laugh or rise screaming from your seat or do both simultaneously.

There has not been a comedy director since Keaton who has dared to allow as much beauty of landscape and climate into his work as Chelsom has because scenic beauty gorgeously photographed tends to distract the viewer from whatever is funny, but Chelsom, like Keaton, manages to make the very beauty of the backgrounds part of the film's humor. It's as if the grandeur of Irish cliffs and the jeweled opacity of Irish mists had rendered the inhabitants slaphappy. And, while the motivations of Chelsom's characters seem transparent, the director has a way of allowing them little moments of stillness, meditation, or the closeness of nature (as when the hero, after a brush with death, lies on his back and gazes up at the stars until an ecstatic smile suffuses his face) that keep us wondering if we really do understand these people after all.

The climax of the movie, the return of the legendary singer, Josef Locke. to the stage under the aegis of the hero actually accomplishes what the equivalent moment in Meeting Venus (Tannhauser's opening) flubs: a demonstration of how art touches the lives of audience members with magic. When Ned Beatty as Locke (voice dubbed by Vernon Midgley) sings an English translation of "Return to Sorrento," you can see and feel each member of the audience focusing so intently on him that the performance seems to be becoming a beautiful memory even as you watch it. That flower that blossoms on the conductor's baton at the end of Venus rightfully belongs in the band of Josef Locke's wide-brimmed hat. In his daffy, artfully artless way, Peter Chelsom captures the unquenchable implication that resides at the heart of all great performances: Your life has not yet surrendered to you its final revelation.