Director: Joachim Lafosse (France, Belgium, Luxembourg). Year of Release: 2023
A woman driving late at night. We first see her bloodshot eyes reflected in the rear view mirror, then follow her into a police station. A female officer greets her, than starts asking questions about her husband François and son Raphael. What is their relationship with each other? Did they see each other yesterday morning before the incident? Why does she think that her son would want to try to murder his father? The woman, Astrid, looks both shocked and exhausted.
Most of the rest of the film takes place in flashback, although those of us with little brain don’t notice this at first. François is besieged by journalists pestering him about his latest case – representing the parents of young murder victims. He patiently answers their questions but warns them that his home and family are a no go area. Anyone entering the grounds of his mansion will be severely dealt with.
Despite François’s apparent concern for his family, not everything is rosy at home. His adult daughter Caroline has moved out and is seething with resentment because of family events which we gradually learn about over the course of the film. Caroline and Astrid have so far collaborated to keep Raphael largely ignorant about what has happened, but matters are coming to a head which could well result in a very public scandal.
In an unrelated thread, Raphael becomes of aware of videos of child pornography on his father’s computer. Shortly afterwards, the police get involved. Copies of the videos are also found on Raphael’s computer. François blusters to the police that the videos were part of his work and that he didn’t watch them for personal pleasure. But if this were true, why have they been accessed 7,700 times? And why does Raphael hear the videos playing behind his father’s door?
Most of the film is viewed through the eyes of Astrid, and to a lesser extent Raphael. This adds to the sense of confusion as a story unfolds about which Raphael does not have the full information and which Astrid is unwilling to divulge. The fact that François largely appears as a secondary figure helps to build dramatic tension while making it easier for our opinion about him to shift as it becomes increasingly likely that he is more culpable than he first seems.
François is a fully-rounded character, At first, he presents himself as a persecuted liberal lawyer, defending the innocent against a corrupt state. To add to our sense of identification, he is played by Daniel Auteuil, who we’re used to experiencing as being the good guy. As the film develops, François is hoist on the petard of his own arrogant belief that he can do what he wants. We experience development in his character, or at least in the way in which we perceive that character.
We do not see similar developments in other characters. Although Emmanuelle Davos does what she can with the part of Astrid, and gradually allows us to be aware that she too is culpable, at least of inaction, this inaction limits the possibility of her character developing. At best Astrid watches on as the old certainties to which she has clung start to unravel. She is not allowed much agency, as the whole point of her character is that she fails to learn from her experiences.
For me, the main drawback in Ein Schweigen comes from the absolute absence of the point of view of the major victim – who we never see nor hear. This has the potential to be dramatically interesting – we are not watching what is supposed to be the big melodramatic events, but their more mundane aftermath. And yet François and his family are so smugly bourgeois that concentrating on them somehow seems to trivialise their crimes.
This all results in a film which was a little too homely for me. I felt like it was concentrating too hard on the relatively minor crime of remaining silent in the face of evil, rather than on the horrors of the evil itself. This makes the film, in part, more of a drama of manners than an investigation into one or more indefensible acts. We linger a little too long in the bourgeois milieu and are invited too much to look at things through the smug eyes of Astrid and her family.
I for one found it difficult to feel empathy with people who are so much different to me. By this, I don’t mean that this is a film about paedophilia, child porn, and attempted murder. I have the emotional capability to deal with all of these. But the fact that we spent so much time hanging around a huge house with its own swimming pool and tennis court made it hard to feel that this was a film about people like Uz.
Now this may have been a deliberate editorial decision, motivated by the idea that falling from a great height is more tragic than the worries of poor people. It might have been a realistic attempt to portray the well-heeled milieu of a prominent lawyer. Or the screenplay may even have been written by someone who thinks that having your own swimming pool is normal. The motivation is secondary. The result was to alienate me, not just from François but from his whole family.
Nonetheless this is a very well acted film, and one which is not afraid to take on Serious Issues. Apparently it’s loosely based on a real story, though I’m not sure whether knowing this would help to increase our enjoyment. Just as with Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel, where many critics spent way too much time discussing similarities with the Madeleine McCann case, you can get too fixated on what reflects “real life” rather than enjoying the film as a self-contained drama.
I just didn’t care enough about any of the characters for Ein Schweigen to stay too long with me. I found it to be an adequate enough but forgettable film about people who don’t really engage me. There are certainly worse films out there, but Auteuil and Devos have both performed in much better than this.
CinePhil 