This karaoke sing-along film – a beloved festival tradition – turns the festival tent into a funk gospel church with David Byrne! Catching the Talking Heads at the height of their creativity and financed out of the band’s own pocket, Stop Making Sense is much more than a traditional concert documentary or a pedantic period piece weighed down by documentary weight. Each song – and the selection includes their greatest hits – is its own dramaturgically conceived miniature work of art, and the almost minimalist opening, in which Byrne interprets Psycho Killer with only an acoustic guitar and a cassette player, builds the players and props step by step into an upbeat, post-modernist mass ecstasy.
The film is directed by the masterful Jonathan Demme (1944–2017), one of our first year’s guest stars, who in his later career made more films about musical geniuses with high-pitched voices (Neil Young, in other words). With Talking Heads, the demand for peculiar performance art is commendably fulfilled alongside their alternative rock heroics, and Byrne, who sometimes resembles a ventriloquist’s dummy with his gaze, bends and shakes his spaghetti-like torso in such a way that if your voice is still hoarse after the previous night, you can easily turn the experience into dance karaoke.
Lauri Timonen