VERY DIFFERENT SENSES : 'Hannibal' & 'Sound and Fury'.

When I saw The Silence of the Lambs I was living in a European city where violent crime was virtually unknown. Strolling home at midnight after the movie, however, I found myself walking at the edge of the sidewalk, then right out in the street, well away from shadows and alleys. I was that rattled.

Silence was a terrific movie, chilling and slyly funny, with a lurking campy impulse (remember the Bon Appetit magazine in Hannibal Lecter's cage before he munches the two guards?) that didn't fully disclose itself until Lecter's priceless closing line, "I'm having an old friend for dinner." (In my view, Richard Alleva's reading of the film [see page 23], with Lecter and Starling as good and evil facing off across a moral chasm, gives Silence a Miltonic seriousness that misses its underlying horse laugh, the way it joined murder with manners in the figure of Hannibal the Cannibal, who cut through the fat of our pretensions to the bone of our hidden truths; who had such unerring, lethal taste.) Jonathan Demme's cunningly plain direction played the genre to perfection even as it winked away, showing us how to smile and squirm at the same time, prefiguring the I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream schlock-shockfests of the decade to follow. As a genre film, Silence was all about having your cake and, well, eating it too. The ending, with Lecter free and feeling peckish, had sequel written all over it. But Demme had left his film teetering on the edge of pure camp; and where to go from there?

Way over the top, is director Ridley Scott's answer. His Hannibal, its Hans Zimmer soundtrack thick with swelling opera themes, offers us the cannibal as celebrity. Ten years on, Lecter--now a marquee name on the FBI's Most Wanted list, his personal artifacts coveted by collectors (his copy of Joy of Cooking fetches $16,000 at Sotheby's)--is living incognito in Florence, giving literary lectures while scarfing down the odd meal (very odd) when the mood moves him. With Clarice Starling still after him (played this time by Julianne Moore), and the Italian cops (led by a haggard, chainsmoking Giancarlo Giannini), and a horribly defaced victim, Mason Verger, who's spending millions devising lurid revenges involving wild boars, Lecter has lots to contend with; but never fear. His power knows no bounds. Vicious guard dogs cower at his approach.

The Silence of the Lambs succeeded through restraint, its energies all the more potent for being enclosed within the form of the thriller, as Lecter was enclosed in his cell. Let loose, both he and the film flail about wildly, his exchanges with Clarice conveying little of the taut, teasing thrill of when he was behind glass and wanted out. Hannibal opens with an FBI drug bust lifted straight from a Don Siegel action movie, and turns into a gruesome farce, a la Delicatessen or Re-animator, with Lecter rifling a hospital pathology lab for cooking utensils (more opera music!) and gleefully tossing off lines like, "I may have to filet your wife after all." Still, you can't help but relish Anthony Hopkins as the Ghoulish Gourmet (a role he also played, to horrific rather than comic effect, in last year's Titus), and it's amusing to hear him crafting culinary double-entendres out of Dante, or to learn that he ate his first victim, a professional flutist, to improve the quality of the Baltimore Philharmonic. Whatever it loses in subtlety, Hannibal makes up in morbidity, and ends by giving "high-grossing film" a whole new meaning.

An Oscar nominee for Best Documentary, Josh Aronson's Sound and Fury studies cochlear implantation, a potentially revolutionary surgical procedure that can bring a large measure of hearing to the deaf. This is not a story about medical technology, however, but about how we understand identity, community, and language. Is deafness a handicap we should strive to eliminate? Or is it a way of life--a culture--we should protect?

The film follows two branches of a Long Island family, the Artinians. Peter and his wife, Nita, are deaf, as are their three young children. Peter's brother Chris, however, is not, nor is his wife, Mari; and upon learning their infant son is deaf, Chris and Mari opt for cochlear implantation. When Peter and Nita tell their bright, adorable six-year-old, Heather, about the operation, the girl decides she'd like one too. She wants to hear bears growl at the zoo, she says. Chris and Mari urge the procedure, but Peter and Nita are reluctant, and an argument begins--with grandparents on both sides weighing in--that tears the family apart.

Aronson subtitles not just dialogue, but sounds, in brackets--"[Ocean waves breaking]"--that inescapably emphasize how much a deaf person misses, a tantalizing world of experiences a child like Heather can literally only imagine. ("If you had a cochlear implant," her grandmother tells her, "you could talk on the telephone.") To nondeaf people, cochlear implants present a good so self-evident, they hardly feel it needs explaining: "freedom, opportunity, and the key to the world," says Chris Artinian. Feeling pressured, Peter and Nita research the procedure. (Initially Nita looks into it for herself, but benefits are much less dramatic for adults, an audiologist informs her.) In their mounting reluctance, we sense a deep fear that hearing will alienate their child from them. They visit a cochlear implant school, where a group of kids, all wearing the small box and wire that transmit signals to a device implanted below the skin, are learning to talk. When Peter urges Heather to sign the story the kids are reading aloud, she refuses, embarrassed--and Peter and Nita see it as the first, dread step toward losing her. Through an interpreter, they question the parents of a cochlear child, asking whether they bothered to find out about the deaf world "before you just went ahead and did it." The conversation grows testy. "Why would you want to keep Heather in that world," the other parents ask, "and not broaden her horizons?"

From then on, the Artinians are on the defensive--against Chris and Mari, and against Peter's parents, who consider their resistance to the procedure irresponsible and selfish. Stung by overbearing and casually cruel arguments (What if you were a family of cripples, Peter's father asks--would you break your kids' legs?), Peter and Nita come to see the procedure as an assault on their identity. At the cochlear class, a parent dismisses sign language as "a crutch" that will hinder her child. Vehemently Peter objects. This is his language that is being wiped out. "I never knew you didn't accept deafness," he says to his parents at a backyard barbecue where the argument rises into open war. But what does it mean to accept deafness when there's an option, a way out?

Sound and Fury explores an area where technology, politics, and identity exist in a profoundly dynamic relation. "What if we lose deafness in the future," asks a group of deaf people assembled by the filmmakers, "and there are no deaf people?" Until very recently, the idea would have been seen as a triumph of medical science. But we have come far along a path honoring diversity, equating language (including sign language) with culture and identity, and turning "disability" into "difference," and it's hard not to hear something ominous in Chris Artinian's angry pronouncement that "deaf culture as they know it is done." "If your hearing culture was wiped out," Peter argues back, "hearing people would feel the loss and cry. Well, so will I."

Aronson treats all sides with remarkable even-handedness, letting us see how an observation that spells relief and triumph to one set of parents--"I don't think she realizes she's deaf," says the girl's mother at the cochlear class--sparks deep anxieties in the other. You can't help but feel for Peter and Nita, with their deepest motives put in doubt, and their own memories of having felt outcast as children pressed upon them by hearing people--they don't want to put their kids through that, do they? That I ended up thinking the other side had the better arguments may simply be more proof that what we believe is, for better and for worse, a question of who we are; and the best we can aim at is humility and imagination in the face of other people's persistent, hard-won otherness.