It's All Gone Pete Tong is a 2004 British-Canadian[2]mockumentary-drama film[3] about a DJ (Paul Kaye) who goes completely deaf. The title uses a rhyming slang phrase used in Britain from the 1980s (Pete Tong = "wrong"), referring to the BBC Radio 1 DJ Pete Tong who cameos in the film.[4]
Ibiza locations used in the movie include the music venues Pacha, Amnesia, Privilege, DC10 and the historic Pike's Hotel and Cala Llonga beach.
Plot
Frankie Wilde is a British music producer and DJ based in Ibiza. After years of playing in nightclubs he loses his hearing, first apparent when he hears a high-pitched whine during an Arsenalfootball match on TV. At this time, Frankie is making his next album with his "two Austrian mates" Alfonse and Horst, but his hearing degrades rapidly and progress stagnates. Frankie refuses to acknowledge his problem until a gig in Amnesia, when he cannot hear the second channel in his headphones and crossfades songs without first beatmatching them. When the crowd boos him, he throws the turntable and the mixer onto the dance floor, and is forcibly removed from the club.
Frankie agrees to see a doctor, who tells him he has lost hearing in one ear and has 20% remaining in the other. Frankie is warned that unless he stops abusing drugs and listening to loud noises, he will soon be completely deaf, and that the use of a hearing aid is for emergencies only as it will further degrade his hearing. During a recording session, Frankie confesses the full nature of his hearing loss to Alfonse. He inserts his hearing aid to demonstrate and, overwhelmed by the sudden sound exposure, leans close to one of the monitor speakers. A frustrated Horst then smashes a guitar into an amplifier whose volume Frankie has maximized. The noise is excruciating and the feedback bursts his eardrum, knocking Frankie unconscious and leaving him permanently deaf.
Without his hearing, Frankie cannot complete his album. He loses his recording contract and his manager Max abandons him. Soon after, his wife Sonya leaves him. Frankie shuts himself into his home, which he has "soundproofed" with pillows in a desperate bid to recover his hearing, and his drug use intensifies. He sinks into a heavy depression, repeatedly throwing his body against the walls, and wrapping Roman candles around his head, either an attempt at suicide or a drastic way to recover his hearing, but dives into his swimming pool before they ignite. Frankie flushes all his drugs down a toilet and is confronted by a recurring vision of a menacing cocaine badger. When he fights and kills it, he learns that the badger is, in fact, himself.
Frankie finds a deaf organization and meets Penelope, who coaches him in lip-reading. They become close, and eventually intimate. He confides his unhappiness at losing music, and she helps him perceive sound through visual and tactile methods instead. Frankie manages to devise a system for mixing songs, in which he watches an oscilloscope trace while resting his feet on the pulsating speakers. Using this system, he manages to produce a new mix CD (Hear No Evil) entirely by himself. He delivers it to Max, who is wildly pleased – particularly by the potential of exploiting Frankie's disability to increase record sales. He has Frankie take part in promotions that are increasingly offensive and insensitive to deaf people, of which Penelope disapproves.
Max convinces Frankie to play live at Pacha as a career comeback, despite Frankie's insistence that he has nothing to prove to his critics. The gig goes exceedingly well, and many claim it shows even greater talent than his early work. After the show, Frankie and Penelope disappear from Max and the music scene altogether. In a talking heads sequence, characters speculate on where he is now, if alive. As the film ends, we see Frankie disguised as a homeless street musician, who is met by Penelope carrying their child. They affectionately walk together down a street, unrecognised. Frankie is shown teaching a group of deaf children how to perceive sound and enjoy music.
Characters and cast
Frankie Wilde (Paul Kaye) is the king of DJs, slowly losing his hearing, and soon to lose everything he thinks is important to him: his job, his fame and his trophy wife.
Penelope (Beatriz Batarda) is the deaf lip-reading instructor who gives Frankie the tough love he never had and always needed.
Sonya (Kate Magowan) is Frankie's supermodel wife. Her days are filled with deciding on what theme is more appropriate for their garden: Japanese or Spanish?
Max Haggar (Mike Wilmot) is Frankie's agent. Overweight, balding and brashly obnoxious, Max is all about money and his mobile phone is his lifeline.
Jack Stoddart (Neil Maskell) is the ruthless CEO of Motor Records who has no sympathy for Frankie. He says, "I didn’t want a deaf DJ on the label. I didn’t want the company to be touched with the deaf stamp. Well, business is tough and sometimes you have to make awkward decisions and I’ve made harder decisions than dropping the deaf DJ."
Fubar rockers Paul Spence and David Lawrence, from Dowse's earlier film, also have cameos as Austrian hangers-on.[5]
Music
Soundtrack
The film's soundtrack was released by EMI on 4 October 2005 as a double discsoundtrack for the film. The 'Night' & 'Day' concept for the soundtrack album was conceived and compiled by Ben Cherrill, who was, at the time, A&R manager for Positiva Records/EMI. Additional production and mixing was by James Doman.
It's all gone pete tong: original soundtrack recording
The DVD was released on 20 September 2005. The U.S. version of the DVD includes 5.1 Dolby Digital, subtitles and several extras that were part of the online/web marketing campaign: Frankie Wilde: The Rise, Frankie Wilde: The Fall and Frankie Wilde: The Redemption.
Reception
Commercial performance
The film made $2,226,603, a little under a quarter million above its $2 million budget.[7]
Critical response
The film has a rating of 76% based on 71 reviews on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the critical consensus stating, "Part raucous mockumentary, part drama-filled biopic, It's All Gone Pete Tong amuses and warms hearts with its touching, comic, and candid look at a musician faced with a career-ending handicap."[8] On Metacritic, it has a score of 56 based on 22 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[9]
Giving the film three stars, Roger Ebert says the film works because of its "heedless comic intensity", chronicling the rise and fall of Frankie Wilde in the film's first two acts "as other directors have dealt with emperors and kings".
Frankie may not be living the most significant life of our times, but tell that to Frankie. There is a kind of desperation in any club scene (as 24-Hour Party People memorably demonstrated); it can be exhausting, having a good time, and the relentless pursuit of happiness becomes an effort to recapture remembered bliss from the past.[3]
Melissa Mohaupt writing in Exclaim! noted "resemblances to various hipster films about music, drugs, excess and failure" such as Trainspotting, Boogie Nights, yet it "never feels stale". There are plenty of quotable quips, and even Frankie's attempted suicide is "high-larious". She says the film manages to be "uplifting without being preachy or cheesy. There are important life lessons to be learned here, or you could just ignore them and enjoy some clever comedy."[10]
Ken Eisner of The Georgia Straight liked the film's "zippy visual style, with sun-dappled primary colours and whirlwind editing to go with the hip pop tunes and block-rockin' beats". He appreciated the fact that Dowse does not milk the many cameos, though the two Fubar actors may have been a bit much.[5] Dennis Harvey, writing for Variety, found those first two acts depressing and decidedly not as advertized (the film was hyped as another This is Spinal Tap), but Michael Dowse rescues the film with "a particularly deft transitional montage that begins with Frankie discovering the musical properties of vibration... segues into lead duo's first lovemaking, and goes on as Frankie re-connects with the dance rhythms he’d thought were lost to him".[2]
Nick De Semlyen, writing for Empire, gave the film two stars, noting there were powerful moments in the film, but thought it was "too dark for casual viewers (or fans of Tong), too blunt to succeed as cult viewing".[6]The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave the film one star, panning it as "breathtakingly charmless and humourless", writing that "Paul Kaye gives a frazzled, one-note performance", while the "appearances by real-life DJs should tip you off that any satire involved is of an essentially celebratory and sycophantic sort; the comedy is leaden, the drama is flat and the attitude to deaf people is Neanderthal".[11]
