What if Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s next project constructed a mystery around your local experimental music festival? Writer-director Jonathan Davies achieves just that with Topology of Sirens. Lushly photographed and even more sumptuously recorded, this slow cinema walks a tightrope of self-absorption. But when the film finally locks you into its wavelength, it conjures a peculiar, endearing magic.
The film follows Cas (Courtney Stephens) as she moves into her late aunt’s Victorian home. Digging around the house, she picks a lock on a closet door and finds a 17th-century hurdy gurdy with a secret compartment in its neck. Inside the compartment are a handful of answering machine cassettes labelled with cryptic designs.
That’s the set-up, and if it’s a minimal start, it contains multitudes. The rest of Topology of Sirens follows Cas as she tries to solve this mystery her aunt left behind, and she takes us on a journey into the unknown recesses of a strange community.
At first, it seems like a foreign setting. With plenty of palm trees and what seems like a quiet pace of life—Cas gets around town leisurely, by bicycle—the setting seems tropical, but the film turns out to have been made around Los Angeles. This is far from the LA of car chases and Hollywood glitz. As Cas explores her neighborhood and dives into the mystery, she comes across: an outdoor experimental music performance; a diner where the house pianist plays patient abstractions; an electronics shop full of obsolete recording devices; the estate of a collector who specialized in 17th-century hardy gurdies and in 17th-century paintings of people playing hurdy gurdies.
Given the film’s fairly pretentious title, one expects such characters, and one can’t be blamed for worrying that this might all be a bit precious. This piece of quiet cinema seems targeted to a very specific niche: fans of both experimental drone musicians and found audio cassettes. But if you are drawn to one you are likely drawn to the other, and despite some precious notes and inevitable longueurs, it’s hard to resist the film’s embrace of physical media and musty antiques.
Stephens was an assistant to Terrence Malick on To the Wonder, and has primarily worked behind the camera. Her fellow cast members are likewise non-actors, but if the dialogue can seem amateurish, it also gives the film the air of an unusual documentary. And the filmmaking is far from amateurish. Cinematographer Carson Lund, who worked on the film’s sound design with Davies, sets up long shots (in composition and duration) with a gentle precision—if you can’t experience this film in a theater, it’s essential you listen with good headphones, because it sounds wonderful.
And a lot of that wonder (less mannered than the Malick film on which Stephens worked) comes from sound and music. Davies sets up the film’s most impressive music by setting up the central mystery. Sure, the variety of electronic collage and found sounds on the audio recordings that Cas found are enigmatic. But it’s when we first hear the hurdy gurdy that Topology of Sirens finally reveals itself. The film is much like the hurdy gurdy Cas finds: it holds its secrets, that Cas gradually teases out, but in its essence, the object is after all a musical instrument—one with a long traditional history, but one whose sound is as otherworldly today as it was centuries ago.
Maybe it’s a spoiler to note that the film’s closing scene has Cas watching—and listening—to a baseball game. But one has to give props to a film that is at once so stubbornly quirky, yet closes with a very American cinematic trope. The game may be a symbol of teamwork and the nation, but it’s also an invitation to take the journey Cas has taken and listen to the world around you; there’s art in everyday moments like this, whether or not you have access to exquisite French stringed instruments. Topology of Sirens is flawed, but it’s one of those movies that, after you experience it, can make you perceive the world in a new light: not by making you see the world differently, but by making you listen to it differently.
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