Non-pros who’ve never attended the Cannes Film Festival won’t care about the following, but a persistent and profoundly irritating sound problem in the Grand Lumiere theatre, the largest inside the sprawling festival bunker known as the Grand Palaix, hadn’t been solved as of last May’s festival, and so this morning I wrote Cannes honcho Thierry Fremaux about asking Boston Light and Sound’s Chapin Cutler to take a look at things:
“Thierry,
“I’ve written you once before about what I and several others regard as a troubling sound issue in the Grand Lumiere. Too much bass and echo, not enough middle-range, and a resulting inability to understand much of the dialogue in certain films. I’m not a sound technician but there’s an acoustical condition called ‘standing waves‘ that may be a factor. Or not — I’m not sure. But I know that the Grand Lumiere’s sound has definitely compromised the dialogue in certain films shown there over the last two or three years, and that a solution needs to be found.
“Last May the dialogue in two films that I saw in the Grand Lumiere — Denis Villenueve‘s Sicario and Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth — was all but unintelligible. More than a few journalists have reported the same. I can say for sure that in the case of Sicario it’s not the mix. A week ago I re-viewed Sicario in CAA’s screening room in Los Angeles, and the dialogue was fine — I understood every last vowel and consonant.