It's all gone, Pete Tong

 It's all gone Pete Tong (2004) is a Canadian-British comedy with dramatic, even tragic, elements directed Michael Dowse.  (Dowse is a reliable Canadian filmmaker who makes audience-pleasing comedies and light thrillers.)  A preliminary title assures us that what we are about to see is based on a true story.  So far as I can determine, the true story is Beethoven's life and his famous Heiligenstadt testament, a despairing account that the composer wrote about the onset of his deafness and its progression to complete hearing loss.  The film is tactful and fairly subtle and alludes to Beethoven only once and, then, obliquely.  The picture is simple, short, and emotionally gratifying -- its raunchy humor, particularly in the opening half-hour, is not to my taste but the film's initial crudeness is esthetically justified as a counterpoint to the picture's inspirational climax and ending.  The acting involves portrayals that are very broad and cartoonish -- but the performers are excellent and the performances vivid.  

The movie can be divided into three parts:  rowdy, vulgar comedy, despair, and redemption.  In the first third of the film, we meet a DJ named Frankie Wilde.  Wilde is supposed to be the world's best and most famous DJ, a role that is surprising for a scrawny White dude.  Wilde is a barbarian, always drunk, unkempt, wandering around with long gooey strings of mucous dangling down from his nose, probably the effect of the shovelfuls (literally in one scene) of cocaine that he inhales.  His DJ shows have a frantic Dionysian energy and he is surrounded by beautiful models.  Frankie has a promiscuous super-model wife with whom all the people interviewed for this mockumentary picture have had carnal relations -- he has a half-black stepson as a result of his wife's fooling around.  Wilde harbors a beast within him, a sort of cross between a skunk and bear -- this creature is the embodiments of his addictive and libertine personality and it's the figure literally shoveling cocaine for Frankie.  The film's first act is short but effective -- Frankie is portrayed as out-of-control, repulsive, and incredibly successful.  He's surrounded by various hangers-on and sycophants including Max, his record producer.  Max is smarmy and cynical and overweight to boot -- he has the role that would have been cast with Phillip Seymour Hoffman if the picture's budget had sufficed.  

In the second half of the movie, Frankie Wilde gradually loses his hearing.  At first, he suffers tinnitus while watching a soccer game.  Then, he has trouble mixing tracks as a DJ and the crowd at the club grows restive.  (The film is largely shot in Ibiza -- who can blame a Canadian director and crew for this choice? -- and features local night-clubs in that place as well as splendid shots of the mountains, Mediterranean landscapes, and the sea.)  Wilde owes his producer a new album.  He goes into the studio but can't manage to record anything.  A very worried-looking Asian doctor, Dr. S. C. Lim tells him that he is totally deaf in his right ear with only 20% hearing retained on the left. Lim warns Frankie to stop using drugs and booze and to avoid loud noises. (Lim playing himself is an indelible presence; he was in Dowse's first film FUBAR playing himself as well.)  Back in the studio, Frankie has inserted a tiny hearing aid that he's been told to use only when absolutely necessary.  Things go wrong ("It's gone Pete Tong"is club argot for "It's all gone wrong") and one of Frankie's headbanger guitarists smashes his instrument into an amplifier when he goes into a rage over Wilde's inability to hear.  The mixing board has been turned-up to ten and the resulting thunderous roar and feedback blow up Frankie's left eardrum.  Frankie is deaf as a stone.).  He falls into a semi-catatonic stupor, poisoned by booze and lies in bed motionless.  He considers suicide, tries exotic Amazonian drugs (Ayahuasca administered by blow-pipe -- in fact, ayahuasca is drank in emetic tea; it is rape that gets blown into your sinuses)), and learns that his trophy wife has left him with his half-black son.  He continues guzzling booze but abandons cocaine.  Using a shotgun, he murders the beast (half-skunk, half bear) that harasses him.  Of course, inside the furry suit, Frankie finds himself.  

In the last part of the movie, Frankie meets a beautiful deaf woman, Penelope, who teaches him to lip read.  Of course, they fall in love.  (The movie is very predictable.)  When he attends a Flamenco exhibition, he learns that he can hear, as it were, by sensing vibrations in the floor and, later, by pressing his fingers to the amps in the club.  He can literally see sound as it vibrates in the glass of whiskey on his table.  (Both he and Penelope like to drink a lot.)  Frankie goes back to the recording studio and relying on vibrations and sinusoidal wave forms on his equipment produces a new DJ record called "Hear no Evil."  The record premieres at the famous Ibiza club, Pacha, and is an enormous success.  (The preliminary to the concert is a thunderous version of Verdi's Requiem on the soundtrack, imparting a sense of stormy -- dare I say Beethoven-like -- gravitas to the record premiere party.)  The record company now wants Frankie back in the stable and Max pleads with him to exploit his deafness as a PR ploy to sell more records.  Frankie is unwilling to make his deafness a selling point for the album and, abruptly, vanishes.  In the film's brief coda, we see Frankie teaching deaf children how to encounter music as sonic vibrations.  Fittingly, the movie ends with a rendition of the Beach Boys' hit "Good Vibrations."

The movie is shot like teenage beach comedy:  brightly lit, clearly legible compositions, and efficient editing.  It is entirely unpretentious to the point of never mentioning Beethoven except in one tiny and elliptical reference.  The film is inspiring but not sanctimonious and has a pleasingly inspirational ending.  Frankie is still a booze hound and probably a carouser but he has found a way to put his disability to work to help others.  The shambolic, brutish reprobate at the beginning of the movie is now associated with the virtuous deaf lip-reader (Penelope) and has devoted his life to helping those who are as deaf as he is.  The idea of a fortunate fall that allows for a second chance is a fantasy that everyone shares and can be moved by -- so the movie leaves you with a slightly, but noticeably, elevated mood:  it's a happy ending that brings the movie full-circle.  At the outset, the theme of the mockumentary was:  What ever happened to Frankie Wilde?   Now, we know and we're glad we know.  

 I expected the movie to show a variation on a famous story about Beethoven.  The deaf composer conducted the premiere of his 9th Symphony.  During the inaugural concert, the orchestra, ignoring Beethoven, got several bars ahead of the composer.  After the final chord had sounded, poor Beethoven kept waving his arms in the air conducting an orchestra that had gone silent.  The soprano had to turn him around to face the audience that was applauding wildly, an acclamation that Beethoven couldn't hear.  

This film has been re-made to great acclaim as The Sound of Metal (2019), a picture about a drummer who goes deaf, but, then, learns ASL and ends up teaching children how to play the drums.  Only you and I know this.  The Sound of Metal doesn't reference It's all gone Peter Tong in the credits or any of the reviews of the movie.