The Sounding is a brave film about resistance: resistance to conformity, to conventionality, to the expectations of the dominant culture and its narratives about normality and sanity and the kinds of lives we're allowed to pursue without the cultural enforcers, including the medical establishment and the state, coming down to set us straight via medication and even incarceration. So long as we speak the exoburban language of consumption and self and reaction and generally behave, chances are good we'll be left alone. But, if, one day, we lose faith in conventional discourse and subvert it by beginning to speak . . . Shakespeare, well, all bets are off.
Catherine Eaton is mesmerizing as Liv, a young woman who, on a windswept island off the Maine coast, has chosen to remain silent for years. Eventually, she begins to speak again, but in an English composed entirely of Shakespeare's words. That's when the assault on her freedom begins. She must be protected, mustn't she? Surely, she must be normalized, the cause of her anomalous behavior diagnosed, and a path to "recovery" prescribed and followed. Surely she must give up her resistance to those who would help her. Surely.
Ms. Eaton both directs the film and delivers a masterful, haunting, and powerful performance as Liv. The cinematography is breathtaking — the Maine coast is difficult to get wrong, but its desolate, Novemberish beauty is a poignant setting for Liv's struggle to be free and live an authentic life as she imagines it. Eaton has written that the film is ultimately about "otherness" and its cost. It couldn't come at a more propitious moment than the present that is witnessing a demonization of the foreign Other who presents such a vulnerable scapegoat onto which too many Americans are projecting their anxiety and insecurity. It will be a great benefit for this film to be available for all Americans to see and think about.
