![]() The great Marlee Matlin, who was instrumental in making sure deaf actors were cast to play all the deaf characters, plays Ruby’s mom Jackie, and she wonders if Ruby is interested in music just to be a contrarian. She sings on the boat every morning, but her father and brother don’t hear her. ![]() In fact, Ruby understandably associates ASL with chores, draining tasks she doesn’t want to do.Ī crush on a cute classmate leads her to sign up for choir class-fortuitous, since Ruby’s favorite activity is singing. But none of the film’s hearing characters, Ruby included, see ASL as an opportunity, or even as equal to spoken/heard language. The Rossis don’t care what the town thinks about them. Some people see it as a problem, while others see it as an awkward inconvenience. She (a teenager, after all) is urgently looking for a way to express herself and does not yet realize what she has at her disposal.įrom the outset, CODA skillfully manages to represent its deaf characters not as disadvantaged for being deaf, while managing to illustrate the rest of the world’s complete incomprehensibility regarding what to do about their deafness. No one-not even Ruby-sees her bilingualism for the beautiful thing that it is, an endowment of two special means of self-expression. She feels like an outsider at school and in the town at large for the ableist prejudice directed at her family, and she feels like an outsider in her family for being the only one with a different experience of the world. To her neighbors in the fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) is seen as her family’s American Sign Language interpreter: a bridge between her deaf parents and brother to the rest of the hearing and speaking community. Both meanings are relevant to Sian Heder’s joyful new film that takes this term as its title-it is the story of a teenage girl who is the only hearing person in a deaf family and therefore must constantly jump back and forth between different worlds of communication and expression. “CODA” is an acronym which stands for “Child of Deaf Adults.” It is also a term in musical notation: a symbol which signals to musicians to jump to another section in the sheet music, to perform a variation on the music they have already played.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |