Voices To Remember

A quotation from Yeats and portentous opening music set the scene for Vladimir Bondarenko's film. We first meet Melissa, the youngest of the stutterers featured, who "narrates" her own and following stories as if reading a fairy story from a book.

After Melissa, everyone else featured is adult. The first of these, Sue Turner, eloquently (and fluently) describes how "living with a stutter is a constant challenge, every day of you life". Sue is one of the central character, and while her speech does seem measured at times it still comes as quite a shock to see her much later in the film (on an old video) demonstrating just how severe her stuttering had been. She talks about how a positive attitude or, "even better", a sense of humour can really help, and you realise that many of the themes here are familiar enough to those of us who've experienced stuttering for ourselves. But the value of the views expressed here is surely that they convey the reality of what it's like to stutter to the wider, fluent public who will see the video and maybe understand stuttering for the first time.

While the point is made that Frank, a farmer, would surely have risen higher at work had he not been shackled by his stutter, there are examples too of those who've succeeded in spite of their speech problem: Marvin, the dentist described as "Dr Wonderful" (!) by his child patients, is a case in point. He's also clearly a warm, likeable character who practices slow speech on Bert (his dog) and relates that about the worst advice he ever had was being told to "slow down, relax and speak slowly when the reason I'm doing it is because I can't get the damn words out?"

Tangled Tongue author Jock Carlisle tells how he though about suicide, then decided how "easy, but uninteresting it would be. Why not start living instead?".

There are parts of the film that some will find crash unacceptably through the sentimentality barrier, but overall I think it's a thoughtful, evocative attempt to explain the reality of stuttering through real lives.

Reviewed by Tim Powell (our Open Days co-ordinator) in the Winter 1994 issue of 'Speaking Out'.

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