Sea breezes, synesthesia and the subtle soundscape design in Isabel Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words

Sound is crucial to the creation of meaning in Isabel Coixet’s 2005 film The Secret Life of Words. The carefully constructed soundscape is essential to the audience’s comprehension the story of Josef, an oil rig worker who has been temporarily blinded in a fire, and Hanna, his nurse, who is hearing impaired. To build the soundscape, Coixet instructed her team to capture the highest quality dialogues, to record authentic ambiences and to edit and mix the sound so that it seems to blow through time and space, as much remembered as heard in the present. Designer Fabiola Ordoyo created a whispery past-tense ambience to surround the clear dialogues in the present. She also manipulated a voice-over track to create a ghostly narrator who appears at beginning and end. The most important result of the careful attention to sound design in this film is that it enables Josef, and the audience, to hear the experiences of Hanna, whose suffering in a rape camp in the Balkan Wars had been silenced for too long. This article examines the sound design in detail and demonstrates how it is essential to telling the story that Coixet presents in Secret Life.