Hilary Potts

As an actual musician (though an amateur one), I do get irritated when it is implied that all you need to get into a prestigious music school is to be able to warble a standard song. Realistically, after a year or so of tuition and hard work, even a girl with a normally hearing background would have done well to pass the audition for a decent amateur choir of the sort where everyone has to be able to sight-sing. And my point is, she probably would have been perfectly happy with that, assuming she didn't want to star in grand opera. If this story is based on somebody real who actually did overcome her disadvantaged background to forge a professional career as a singing artiste, I expect she could have, like a fair number of pop singers, sung by ear without ever mastering note-reading - and, like most pop musicians, she wouldn't have seen much point in going to the Juillard in order to laboriously learn skills she had little use for. This part of the scenario just doesn't make sense; however, other than that it was an absorbing and sympathetic film which treated the deaf family as real people with more to them than just representing deafness. It was good to see a serious "problem" film having time and space for quirky characterisations and humour. Hilary Potts